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It's basic business management. Your various sales channels have different costs. Selling directly is the cheapest while selling via a multi-layer distribution channel (publisher to wholesaler to regional distributor to bookstore) is the most expensive since every level needs to make a profit.
But, if you base your sales price purely on the cost you end up losing your more expensive sales channels-and the sales you make via those channels, of course.
I don't think any publisher wants to reduce sales in order to keep the price low, so what they do is adjust *their* sale price to the different channels in an attempt to keep the price to the end consumer roughly the same.
Assuming you can justify a $27 price for a hardcover book in the first place (questionable IMO, but certainly not uncommon) then good business practice demands that the price be approximately $27 regardless of the channel, as long as your hardcover sales hold up.
Yes, the basic motivation is greed-but greed is the basic motivation of all businesses. At least all successful businesses. Given that the rest (equalizing the price regardless of channel) is reasonable.
And even with all of that, many practices still make no sense to me. What that tells me is that not all publishers (or business managers in other fields, for that matter) are rational. I've seen too many cases where it's obvious that nobody bothered to think about what was being done. And that's particularly true in customer service. (Ever visit a tech support site that starts by asking what your level of experience is and then continues by giving you the type of instructions that they'd give to the person completely unfamiliar with their product, even if you told them you were an expert with it?)
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