Thats more of a perception problem than an actual fact. It turns out that hosting/supporting ebooks does have incremental costs and people dramatically over estimate how much the price of a hardback is the physical copy. If they just priced the difference in physical production vs ebook support into the price, I think most people would be surprised at how little the discount would be.
Now there is a difference of course but the greater part of the price of a book comes from the creation of the intellectual property (including subsidizing all those books that don't get sold) and the sales process.
The bigger issue is that publishers have lots of expertise in selling physical books (100s of years) and ebooks are brand new. Further, the biggest platform for ebooks is run by a company that is not in anyway aligned with the publishers business interests and is in fact a competitor. This is not true of traditional book sales channels.
The publishing industry can blame themselves for that.
Back before ebooks, a typical paperback would run between 8-12 dollars whereas a hardcover would easily be 20 dollars or more.
This gave the perception that printing and binding is a significant portion of book price.
Of course, we all know that's crap. In practice, they were simply charging a premium markup for a product that was perceived as being superior.
But now who can blame the consumer for having the same basic expectation, but in the opposite direction, when ebooks are considered?
In fact, it doesn't make sense: it's not like hard covers get cheaper over time.
Those stores used economies of scale to make the 40% discount (basically selling for cost) on blockbusters to drive business into the store, with the hope that people would also pick up higher margin items (toys, coffee, etc).
But the more traditional bookstore model was to stock the blockbuster hardcovers at full price, then move them onto discount shelves as time from release went down, until they had to return them to the publisher right before the soft cover release date neared and the books became a liability (as the people that were willing to pay the premium for early access had already been exhausted).
There are still places that have heavily discounted hard covers. The entire business is called 'remainders' and the publishers sell giant warehouses full of hard cover books for pennies that they deem unsellable as they are too far from release date. Soft backs don't go through this process as they are even less valuable, the publishers pulp those, sometimes at a loss.
[edit] another more obvious way to think about this is, why do hardcovers and soft backs come out at different times? If it was just about the 'premium' product vs the lower end one, they'd be released at the same time. But they aren't. They are release about a year different.
But are you claiming form factor is not part of the price at all? If so, how do you explain it for books that have both versions actively in print?
Or especially if I'm going to gift it to someone who really wants it.
* The fixed costs of publishing a book dwarf the marginal price of each printed book. Those fixed costs are dominated by the salaries (or 1099s) of human experts.
* Like most products, books aren't priced from their (minimal!) marginal cost basis. They're priced based on utility and market substitutes.
* If ebooks were priced "too high", nobody would buy them. But in fact, so many people buy ebooks that they're putting bookstores out of business.
The "resentment" you're referring to is I think maybe mostly a creature of message boards.
The problem is that despite that being so, ebooks also have zero incremental costs. People recognize that, and so they resent eBooks costing as much as hardbacks. If eBooks were only and explicitly > hardbacks, people would happily pay more, but there's more to it than just value.