Open Road Media are the same company
which said that they'd like to break Amazon's usual 9.99 price threshold for e-books, in order to charge $14+ for theirs. And they mainly re-publish rather older backlist titles by semi-known-in-their-genre authors*, not new release hardcover-equivalent bestsellers by widely-known famous ones.
I think someone has a disproportionately skewed idea of what the likely actual market value of their catalogue is.
That said, these new Einstein editions are supposed to have extra bonus stuff that presumably wouldn't come with a transcribed older public-domain-in-Life+50-countries edition, so it's not like they're not adding any extra value whatsoever.
* Sigh. They just negotiated for all of Barbara Hambly's backlist. At least I'll always have my paperbacks & hardcovers to read from.