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The failure of publishers to lower ebook prices when books hit paperback is, I think, not so much due to greedy design as to clerical inattention. When my own novel Sunborn came out as a Tor ebook, around the same time that the agency model kicked in, the ebook was at a higher price than the recently published paperback. I brought this to their attention, and they promptly lowered the ebook price to match the paperback. This sort of thing happens in publishing all the time.
I dislike the agency model, not because of higher prices--in general, the prices seem about the same to me--but because it prohibits discounting and kills competition among bookstores (other than choice of platform). It's killing Fictionwise, whose great sales were once a main reason to shop there; now those sales are limited to non-agency publishers (which, to be fair, still includes a lot of great books).
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