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The other question is just how much additional labor is put into the eBook side of things. Not just on the reader-maker's side - there has to be person(s) on the publisher's side as well. To push the buttons, to negotiate, etc.
And negotiation and selection must be fairly complex. Some authors sell all potential future rights to the publisher on acceptance (serial series books, especially, are known for contracts which deliver all rights to the text,) sometimes e-rights are specifically held back for later negotiation, and of course there's the host of books which were pre-ebook (or, at least, before anyone realized there should be eBook reprint rights.) So you have to have people on both sides to do research, etc. And that also makes negotiation on a book-by-book level - the publisher probably can't just release it's whole stable at one even if they wanted to.
While it's too much to hope for that the publisher doesn't make more money for the e-version, I wonder what that translates to for the author. Were I a savvy author, I might consider the e-version to be another "printing," and one that will sell less copies overall inherently. So I might want a little bigger cut of the pie. Whether that's fair or not depends on if you think the author's sum compensation should be based on the sale of an individual copy, or accrued into a lump sum based on the number of copies sold. Either way, more money to the author per copy sold would be a good inducement to an author to sell the eBook rights.
And, come to that, more money is an inducement to the publisher to produce ebooks also - remember that they have no compulsion to do so. If it works the way I suspect, eBooks would be a different division at a publishing house - so that division has to justify its existence to the company. If eBooks don't make the publisher more money than print, why would a publisher keep that division?
While I've read many eBooks that seemed to have been simply converted from one format to another, I've also read ones that were very specifically formatted to the Reader platform. I'd guess that means that the formatting of the file is a publisher's choice and expense. (I wish there was a little better QC on Sony's end, but oh well...)
I think where I'm going is to say that, while it seems hard to justify eBooks costing as much as print, I don't think anyone can prove that they cost less before looking at the balance sheet of the publisher. Which would be an interesting exercise for the financially minded, but a lot of trouble for an answer that probably won't change the situation.
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