Here's the situation.
Back when we were doing the Beta, we certainly did not have any plans to revisit the Campaign Setting book with a new edition. We had plenty of stock left, and while we knew we'd eventually have to do something, it seemed like that stock would last us a couple of years.
Well, it turns out this Pathfinder thing is more popular than we would have dare hoped back then, when we were really struggling to survive in our second major "transitional" period in as many years.
Fast forward to today, where we've churned through two print runs of the Pathfinder Core Rulebook and are preparing the third. I thought maybe, just maybe, if all the cards fell our way, we'd have sold out that first print run by the end of December. Instead, it was gone before the book's formal release in August. We were happy with that (beyond happy, really) but we didn't really plan for it, and we didn't have any idea what the increased popularity of the system would mean for our other product lines.
Happily, it has meant increased interest in ALL the Pathfinder lines, but the place where it has had the largest impact is the Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting. (It probably didn't hurt that the setting won two consecutive "Best Setting" ENnies, either.)
So book stores and game stores that have been having huge success with the Core Rulebook and the Bestiary have also stepped up their orders (and sales) of the Campaign Setting hardcover, and our supplies of the book are now dwindling to the point that I do not honestly expect them to last to the end of next month.
That means we either reprint a book with a few errors that drive us nuts and a lot of pages of rules jukes that don't work perfectly with the final Pathfinder rules and a dearth of "crunch" anyway because we didn't know what system we'd be supporting when we wrote it, or we go back and do a revised edition that fixes the errors, adds some cool new stuff, and makes it work seamlessly with what is now pretty much unquestionably the second most popular fantasy roleplaying game currently on the market.
So that's what we're in the process of figuring out how to do.
Back when our Customer Service team told you we had no plans to update the book they were speaking the absolute truth. We did not, at the time, have any plans to do this. We didn't even have plans to do this this last August, when we released the Core Rulebook. Only the increased depletion of our Campaign Setting print run has forced us to look at this more seriously, and that's only happened in the last five months.
Which is yet another reason why "that's a good problem to have, but it's still a problem" was my official catchphrase for 2009.
I'm still working on 2010's.
--Erik Mona
Publisher
Paizo Publishing