I agree, that's what I found interesting about the article. That Amazon is trying to break up the monopoly of the traditional publishers which don't seem to understand digital at all. The traditional publishers price their ebooks above the print prices which makes no sense economically (even older books well past their days on the best seller list) and almost never put them on sale. I've passed on so many books because I refuse to pay $9.99 or $12.99 for an ebook of a novel that came out 15 years ago when I can get a used copy for $1.99 (or less). When this happens I either pass on the book completely, buy a used copy, or download it from a torrent site. Either way, the publisher gets nothing.
Audiobooks do carry a higher cost, but at least their is some reason for that (gotta pay the voice talent, producers, editors and the cost of hosting the file itself which can be in the GBs rather than the few KBs of an ebook). You can hear the difference from a poor quality audiobook and one that is done well, but to want to charge $12.99 for the audiobook and then turn around and charge me another $9.99 for the ebook just so they can be "sync'd" is insanity.
I'm hoping for the days when ebooks/audiobooks will be more like digital video games on Steam or GOG. The new ones will always be pretty expensive, but the price will go down quickly over the next few years. Of course, if Amazon establishes its own monopoly that is going to bring about a whole other set of problems, but at least Amazon seems to understand the economics a bit better than the dinosaur publishers.
I have a fire tablet. Amazon recently put a little thingy in the home "just for you" page... "switch seamlessly between reading and audio book". I thought for a second and figured that might be handy. Read up on it a little: "Buy a kindle book with an audio companion, buy the audio compan-" wut? You want me to buy the book twice?? Screw that.
eBooks can be done right especially with devices that use eInk - they look a lot like a printed page. But sellers and publishers are being so retarded with it, usually charging as much or more than the print book. This is why eBooks are not doing nearly as well as they could. It's utter insanity.