This article and the comments discuss this issue:
http://www.davidderrico.com/cost-bre...printed-books/
Print costs are a fraction of the costs to a Big 5 publisher, but not a small insignificant fraction. And, of course, other costs unique to a print book are shipping and warehousing, and the costs associated with accepting returns (for full credit) of unsold books by bookstores. Unlike ebooks, these costs are incurred for every book printed, sold or unsold. The marginal cost of producing ebooks is negligible.
And as pwalker pointed out in post #218:
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Generally what you pay for with trade or hard back is getting the book a year before the regular paper back is available. The publisher's price model is mostly based on availability and price points rather than cost of materials.
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Adopting pwalkder's above analysis, historically big publishing has been in control of those very factors, availability and price point. The growth of ebooks and the Indie market, together with Amazon's discounting, deprived them of that control. Agency has given them back control over ebook prices, which they are using in the same old way to perpetuate so far as possible this historical "pricing model". However, their books no longer make up the whole market. There is a significant and growing competitive part of the market where they control neither price nor availability. In the Indie segment of the market it is largely supply and demand which determine the price points for ebooks, not manipulation of price or availability. Indie ebook pricing is therefore a much better reflection of what a proper price for an ebook should be, as it is set by the market without artificial interference or a bias towards protecting and old "price model" for print books.
This leaves large publishing in somewhat of a quandary. If they price an ebook correctly, that is at a point to maximise overall revenue, they risk destroying their paper sales of the particular book. Naturally, like all of us, they would like to have their cake and eat it too. The best of all possible worlds for them is to either "window" the ebook, which has proved to be unpopular and ineffective, or price the ebook at a level so as to preserve paper sales in successive formats. This is what they are doing at the moment. It is, as I said previously, not irrational and currently seems to be working reasonably well for them at the moment.
If you have a few moments, do read the above linked article and comments. It is quite an interesting read.