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Mainstream (Big 6) publishers have been treating backlist ebooks as falling into roughly the same niche as new trade paperbacks. They tend to charge more for them than mmpbs, which often don't exist for the titles because they're out of print. When pressed, they mumble about the cost of conversion.
Most of them do have to be created from scratch; any book that's more than a few years old probably doesn't have a final-version electronic copy available. While they were made electronically 10 and maybe even 20 years ago, changes in filetypes and lack of storage space meant most publishers had a policy of clearing them out as soon as the print run was finished.
Publishers refuse to discuss the fact that the editing has already been done on those titles, and that they've got a pre-existing audience. (They also usually refuse to put effort into proofreading when they do make them.)
I like Baen's system: frontlist, backlist, whatever... $6 per ebook. Differences in production costs are negligible; they're charging for convenience and portability, and hoping the customers find the rates low enough to be worth paying.
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