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I worked at a second-hand book store for a couple of years. (yeah I know, we're basically stealing from the authors/publishers, because they lose sales because of us...) And those slightly larger paperbacks were such a nuisance. The obvious thing is that nobody really wants them.
People brought them to us, and expected to get a nice price for them, because, well, they certainly paid a high price for them, but after the normal sized paperback came out, nobody would buy the oversized one any more, even second hand. So we would mostly only buy them if the real paperback wasn't released yet, because once the real paperback got released they became a hard sell... obviously because NOBODY wants them, and everybody prefers a real paperback in normal size.
Anyway, the way the publishers talk in that article I get the feeling they're thinking more along the lines of: "well, we have a certain business structure, which does things in a certain way, and we have this many people, that all want to get paid a certain amount, so basically we need to cover those costs, so 15% is still very reasonable..."
Uhm this site is loaded with books that got converted for free. Even having to scan a paperback with a really good scanning machine shouldn't cost much if people at home can do it for nothing.
Infra-structure? Well the people of mobileread certainly have found a way to let people download the books for a nice price. Besides if the darknet can distribute millions of books for free, why should publishers have such gigantic costs?
Seriously, if you were to build from scratch a publisher just for ebooks, surely you could do better than to offer 15% to an author. The author might as well start his own ebook publisher.
Only thing lacking is publicity, but then again, if more and more of the publicity happens on the internet, the publicity of having your book in the bookstore-window might be worth less and less.
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