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Certainly in my household, an ebook sale does NOT cannibalize a pbook sale. In fact, owning an ereader has actually brought the household back to book-buying. So each sale is a net gain for the publisher.
Second, while it's true ebook prices are often the same or higher than pbook prices, we are comparing actual ebook prices with highly discounted online vendor pbooks -- not the prices you see in the bricks-and-mortar store. As a general rule, ebooks are significantly cheaper than what I'd pay in my local bricks and mortar bookshop.
An example I love to cite: Steig Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is $13.50 from Penguin Canada and that's the price at the till at my local Chapters/Indigo. This is a flimsy mass market edition, not a handsome, better bound trade edition. Yet Penguin Canada will sell me the same novel at $7.99 from kobobooks and $7.65 from Amazon -- Penguin Canada editions each. (The hard cover is $32.)
Penguin is one of the "agency five" and both Kobo and Amazon "did the deal". I am simply not seeing the impact except possibly in a handful of just released titles which the publishers believe they can sell at $12.99 and higher. They're wrong: I am simply redeploying my funds to something cheaper in the meantime and will buy those titles later when they are more reasonable and assuming I am still interested.
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