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Well, I try to only wade into the price discussion about once a year, and my day-to-day experience in a publishing company get more and more out of date, but I do actually understand the publishers' perspective on this too.
The problem is with the mega authors, for whom they have to bid unreasonably advances in order to land their titles and retail shelf space. The publishers are happy enough to take the $12 from Amazon for the wholesale cost of the ebook, but creating an implied value of $9.99 for the content of a new bestseller is scaring them out of their two-piece suits. If that were to become the accepted retail pricing, and cascade the wholesale price down to $7 or even $5, the big titles might never pay off their advances.
It's a nasty catch-22 - keep your prices high and push your customers away - or lower your advances and prices and push your authors away.
And although there are a number of authors whose advances are so high that they never fully earn them (the advance it theirs to keep regardless), the other big authors who are profitable are the ones whose profits do help underwrite the direct to paperback smaller authors, most of whom bomb and sell fewer than 1000 copies.
I don't know if there is a solution that works for everyone - the possibility of delaying ebook by four to six months to grab the maximum hard cover sales without ebook cannibalization may be the most workable approach. Not that I like waiting for my books, but I can survive. I'd rather do that then pay $15 for an ebook, unless it's a very very special book.
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