However, the claims that Apple, Macmillan, et ali make that they were trying to 'prevent a monopoly' are flawed at best.
There were e-books long before Kindle came on the market. Those have not gone away. I have a Kobo as my primary reader - it is my second. My roommie has a Sony - and has since before the Kindle hit the market.
Amazon is competing with the Adobe format e-books by providing better service, and less obtrusive DRM. (My first e-reader is full - it has a memory card, but the Adobe DRM does not allow it to be accessed for most of the commercial e-books.
The native software for the Kobo tries to cram them all in to the reader, and no longer plays nicely with Calibre. (It used to - but apparently the publishers asked them to change that....)
The Kindle stores info in a cloud and allows me to put books in the cloud and pull them out when I need them. I have less actual memory, but it is handled in a much more flexible manner.  I prefer my Kobo - but the Kindle has infinitely better software.
The biggest single commercial publisher of e-books is Baen - which is not a big company, does not bother with DRM, prices e-books at less than the price of a paperback, and does not market exclusively to any one format. That word 'commercial' is important - Project Gutenberg is bigger. However - Baen plugs Gutenberg and Gutenberg plugs Baen. Baen even put the entire Gutenberg SF library, properly attributed, on a CD that was included in one of their books.
Baen sells more e-books than they sell books to Canada.
They use a different model than either the Agency model of Apple or the model used by Amazon - in part because they are their own distribution network for e-books.
They typically sell e-books for $6 or less - discounts in monthly bundles and a vast Free Library.
Most of the choke is not in the publishing industry, it is in distribution.
A flawed distribution model is part of what killed TSR. I suspect that it is crippling D&D for WotC.
The publishers are trying to use a flawed distribution model for e-books, and crippling their market in the attempt.
So, yes, greed really is at the root,along with not being willing to create a new model for distribution.
Plus, I think, a fear of piracy is causing them to fight against the format, with results that encourage piracy.... Much like WotC first charging the same for PDFs as they did for print books and then pulling PDFs entirely off the market.
Paizo charges a much more reasonable amount for their PDFs, and has much less of a piracy issue. (Or they are willing to ignore the piracy.) They make a good deal more on their PDFs than I think was likely the case for WotC.
The Auld Grump
*EDIT* I went to Subway, came back, finished my post, then hit Submit... only to find that Zenguy had already made most of the same points while I was noshing on buffalo chicken....
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