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The cost of producing a hard cover book or a trade paperback is usually only a dollar or two more expensive to make than a mass market paperback. The real reason why the HC or TPB are more expensive is because you're getting them closer to the original publication date than you would a MMPB. In other words, they price the original edition to pay back the upfront costs of publishing a new book, and the secondary formats are cheaper because the upfront costs are mostly already paid for. That's why the publishers don't want ebooks to be priced comparable to a MMPB, because it steals sales away from the most lucrative edition. Unfortunately this also means that when the publishers reprintf classic novels which barely sell enough to break even in the TPB/HC format, they will price the ebook to be comparable to the expensive edition, even though the ebook may well have much higher sales at a lower price.
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