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There's also a certain amount of historical baggage lying around. This dates back to the days when publishers operated in a single country or region, and it was physically difficult for them to distribute books in other parts of the world.
It's not so much a question of the author selling the rights to different publishers in different countries. What used to happen is that the main publisher (the one who first entered into a contract with the author) would buy worldwide rights, but would only actually publish in their own territory. They would then sell the rights to other territories to publishers in those other areas.
The same happened with non-book rights. The original publisher would publish a traditional book, but might sell the the audio book rights to a firm that specialised in that area.
Nowadays, the big publishers are multi-national and multi-disciplinary, but the model described above still survives. It probably seems natural from the publisher's perspective to include ebooks in the model.
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