And he's pressing the point in News Corp's negotiations with Amazon and Apple.
News Corporation boss Rupert Murdoch has praised Apple's approach to selling e-books in its new iBooks store for the iPad tablet, but criticised Amazon's policies.
"We don't like the Amazon model of selling everything at $9.99," he said during the company's quarterly financials analyst call last night.
"They don’t pay us that. They pay us the full wholesale price of $14 or whatever we charge. We think it really devalues books and it hurts all the retailers of the hard cover books."
News Corporation owns publisher Harper Collins. Murdoch went on to say that its agreement with Apple for iBooks "does allow for a variety of slightly higher prices" - which implies that Apple WON'T be selling e-books for a flat $9.99 price.
This, despite Apple CEO Steve Jobs saying in an interview directly after the iPad launch that "the prices will be the same" on iBooks as on Amazon. There may be trouble ahead...
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"There will be prices very much less than the printed copies of books, but still will not be fixed in a way that Amazon has been doing it," continued Murdoch in the News Corp conference call.
"It appears that Amazon is now ready to sit down with us again and renegotiate pricing." This may be in reference to Amazon's separate spat with book publisher Macmillan.
Meanwhile, Murdoch had plenty of zingers during the call on News Corp's bullish views on the importance of its content to the technology world.
"Content is not just king. It is the emperor of all things electronic," he said. "Devices and platforms are proliferating but this clever technology is merely an empty vessel without any great content."
Oh, and: "Without content the ever larger and flatter screens, the tablets, e-readers and the increasingly sophisticated mobile phones would be lifeless. Without content these ingenious and wonderful devices would be unloved and unsold."
