Ah, this topic. I try not to wade into it too often, but it's been over a year so....
I'm actually one of those folks who generally agrees with the publishers that
in the current publishing climate eBook prices from major publishers are not way out of line. There are a lot of title costs involved in producing a salable ebook - some fixed, some marginal and some opportunity costs - and generally a fairly low first year sales run over which to capitalize these costs. Believe me, it can cost a couple of thousand dollars to convert even an electronic final copy manuscript into salable, professional (ie DRM) eBooks, and that's for titles that may only sell a few hundred copies.
The figures become far more positive when the eBook-to-pBook ratio favors eBooks, and downright delightful for eBook only publishing where one does not have to maintain both a physical and electronic delivery channel.
That said, this particular publisher goes a little off the deep end. If the industry weren't so paranoid about disclosing figures, he could probably have made a better case by laying out the actual costs, rather than exaggerating for effect.
