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Here's the thing about mass market paperbacks: in the USA (not in the UK -- at least, not since 1991) they're sold on much the same basis as magazines. Shops buy them and pay the publisher for the number of books they bought at wholesale price, put them in the racks for a couple of months, then remove them and return them to the publisher for a refund in full. However, rather than ship gazillions of paperbacks about, they merely strip off the covers and return those (which saves a lot of money -- returned MMPBs are unlikely to sell and the publisher will be left paying a refund and warehousing costs out of pocket). The stripped books are then pulped.
Trade paperbacks and hardbacks are not sale or return items, and are not stripped/pulped if they don't sell -- they can be returned for a refund but will end up back in the warehouse and going out again until they're sold.
Obviously these models are grotesquely inappropriate for ebook sales -- but as I noted earlier, the big publishers aren't nimble enough to re-organize their internal business structure to adapt to the new market. As it is, they see ebooks as just a funny new-fangled distribution channel for an electronic equivalent of the dead-tree editions they're used to shipping -- treating the ebook market any differently might actually require someone to think about things, and That Would Never Do.
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