Sure, some people prefer hardcopies, good for them. But claiming that e-books being priced similarly is some market failure is taking it too far, for some of us it seems perfectly reasonable. If e-books were priced higher (even as much as 50% more) I'd still buy them over physical copies.
A market that had more than one way to "publish" books online would be a different ballgame than the one we're playing now
Yup, this is why I'm a fan of the likebook/boox type e readers. They all run stripped down versions of Android and many of them have SD card slots too. I use the likebook Mars (~$200) as my daily reader only (bigger ones are nice if your budget allows) and it is so much nicer than the Kindles imo. Default reader can handle all formats, you can dump your own fonts and dictionaries on it, and you can run the Kindle, kobo, libby, etc apps if you want to (since you can use Google play). Ofc being a cheap Chinese e reader it isn't exactly something that can run real apps at more than a couple fps but it's great for static content like books.
Hence putting a hard price on this functionality is nigh impossible - whereas re-sale value is often easier to estimate and clearly tangible to the consumer. Claiming that they are equal is certainly not clear to me.