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The thing is that while the BPH's might not be adjusting as quickly as you'd like, they'll need to adjust at some point if the masses view their prices as too high. Or they'll go out of business, unless they can increase print sales to reclaim the lost profits of ebooks.
I've seen claims here that publishers should treat the editors, artists, and authors better. Including better royalties, and better overall pay. Yet I've also seen a fairly strong claim that ebook prices are, currently, too high.
These seem to me to be mutually exclusive if you accept that the profit margins on ebooks versus pbooks is, relatively, narrow, and consider that most BPH's release print and digital versions of their books. I'm not saying ebook sales should prop up pbooks, nor the other way around. Though big name authors do prop up new authors, and thus -book- sales prop up -book- sales.
I'd also point out that in the course of my lifetime mass market prices have risen maybe 4 dollars or so. At least from the earliest prices of books I can recall compared with the typical prices today. This is for the US market, I'm not sure how prices have fluctuated in other countries. But at that growth rate it's not even doubled in a number of decades. I think it can be argued that this price increase is roughly keeping up with inflation. And while I'm using mass markets, the cheapest of print books, ebook prices tend to fall to around the mass market price once the print book is released in that edition.
I think BPH's shoudl take the route of treating their staff and authors better. As well as accepting more new authors and releasing them only in digital. It may not get them as many sales as a print release would, but if the digital sales are significant they can consider doing a print run. This saves them some money, and puts them in a position to react quickly should the new author prove to be popular.
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