On what material should that "abandoned idea" have been based in 1995? You're just doing (or repeating) the next best speculation.
At the time "Book 1" can't have been anything more than a bold empty statement, that fitted the whole "here I still stand" concept of the HIStory album presentation. Bold and empty like Michaels later "The best is yet to come!".
Be honest, did you even know it was a 3x12" before you read my post?
And no, high manufacturing costs do not explain fewer manufactured copies. That's broken logic. If manufacturing costs are high, you want to produce MORE to get the costs back in and keep the price for customers low.
In this case the fewer manufactured copies were a result of low sales expectations for this specific vinyl format, which at the time was pretty much dead in the pop mainstream world. So there was only one batch of vinyl produced for the die hard collectors. Same with the other (by 1995) "special interest" formats they did for HIStory, the double MC and double MiniDisc. Compared to the CD format, those were all niche products, only made in limited amounts, to seize all possibilities to boost the sales numbers of the album, to get good chart debut results. For the same reason the Invincible album was released with 4
limited different color covers etc.
Doing more copies of the same (once all the manufacturing tools are made for vinyl) is not that complecated or expensive, but back then there simply was not a big enough demand for pop music on vinyl.
The reason that they don't do a 1:1 reissue of the 3x12" now (or in the decades after it's initial release), is that those vinyl manufacturing tools (metallic stampers) usually do not survive many years. It's a complecated and expensive process to have them made, and doing all that from scratch for a 3x12" just for a collectors re-release probably isn't feasible enough, at least in this specific case of this album.
"Distribution cost for the record company"?
Huh?
The costs in distribution are with those BUYING it FROM the record label (distributors, wholesalers, shops, customers).