Very good and yes: Think of it from the manufacturer / seller perspective. Why shouldn't it be? If the goal it to optimize profit or return (and it is), then anything less would be a waste of opportunity. Even kickstarters go to great effort to think up ways to "justify" "bonus offers".
This is often one of the great failures of new ventures not to try and offer versions or features that SOME customers would love to pay for.
Except not pricing discimination in that these prices apply to everyone (who doesn't know the discount code). Just "differentiation" and "price point". Offering a different price to someone who "calls" from San Francisco, Kansas City or Mumbai is a different issue, and less palatable.
The interesting thing about this statement is that expecting a fixed price for anything is a relatively new phenomenon. It isn't very long ago that the price for pretty much everything was individually negotiated in some physical market, and nobody expected to pay the same price as everyone else.
This is a lot like back in the movie rental days. The VHS cassette for a new release would be $120 or something, and only a few months later could you buy it at the grocery store checkout for $25.
It's certainly plausible, but I'm not going to just accept it.
“Enthusiasts” might have legitimate reasons for preferring hardcover (durability, aesthetics, etc) and are willingly and knowingly paying extra for that.
How much it cost to manufacture is mostly irrelevant.
I've worked at a place where there was exactly one chip and ~8 ways to disable different things to make the whole product family, with nearly 2x difference in cost between low and high. This is usually done by disabling bad sections of the chip, but if yields are too high, you just disable functioning bits of good chips. Our yields were great. :-|
I think the term used for this practice is "market-segmentation".