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Publishers really want to be able to reduce the cost of their ebooks. It's really hard to compete in this market if we don't, especially with so many free and bargain books. Publishers try to set the ebook price below the price of the print book, while not devaluing by making it look like a remaindered book to be cleared out of stock.
It's just quite hard to do this because there are misleadingly low prices for books with online sellers that don't actually exist and would never be supplied, so we can't compete with those prices. For example, I can see some of our print books on offer from Amazon market resellers for just £3. We never supply books at that discount so these books can't possibly exist and you often find if you order from Amazon that a book isn't supplied.
These books are what are called 'loss leaders'. Either they don't exist but the very attractive prices draw customers to the seller's website. Or Amazon and others actually do sell some books at below cost price because they can balance that against the huge profit they make by taking a commission from marketplace sales where they actually have no expenses and no work to do.
So it is possible that print books could be cheaper than ebooks at times. They are sold at a loss in a way the publisher can't compete with. The minimum price we could charge for an ebook while paying the author a royalty, the online seller a commission of at least a third, and even if we took nothing ourselves, could work out at more than the lowest price from an Amazon marketplace seller.
The answer to this, in my opinion, is that publishers will only manage with ebook sales when people choose ebooks because they really want them, rather than because they feel they should be a cheaper option than a print book. This is actually why I buy ebooks. I prefer them - they don't clutter my house up and I can carry them around so easily to read when out and about.
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