Apple Kills the Textbook with iBooks 2, iBooks Author

[Spike89]

61. Obviously not long, which is my point

If what you're really asking is "Why would publishers agree to subsidize an emerging segment of the market?" then the answers are pretty simple. At this point e-books are not significantly affecting paper book sales and the actual situation is that the paper version (not the publisher) is subsidizing the e-book. My publishing house does this--once we spend the money to get a manuscript into publishable format, the additional cost isn't that much to convert to e-book formats. Most importantly though, we don't do any e-book only books because there is no way the business model makes sense.
So, that's point one...it costs little to add an e-book version to an existing publication and because e-book sales (for non-fiction especially) are currently not affecting paper book sales significantly, there is almost no downside.
Even so, why would publishers consent to having their products sold below cost on a platform that is still highly speculative? Easy, market share. Pearson, McGraw Hill, et al., do understand that not only do they risk getting shut out of the market if and when the e-book market eventually does become profitable, they know that being seen as "behind the times" could hurt them competitively in current sales.
BTW - you will find that a few true "paper-free" e-books are making their way into the market. For the most part, they are almost exclusively in highly specialized niche markets. These ebooks actually reflect their true cost. Most are in the $100/copy range, but I've seen prices near $1,000 for a single volume.