Like a lot of publishers lately, News Corp. Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch has often expressed frustration with Amazon’s revenue sharing policies, which is generally a split of 70/30 percent in the e-commerce company’s favor. The release of Sony’s new e-readers represents a chance for publishers to blunt Amazon’s dominance and get some leverage in future negotiations.

In a Q&A at Mediabistro’s eBook Summit yesterday, Steve Haber, president of Sony’s Digital Reading Business Division, discussed the issues of pricing for e-books, but didn’t touch on newspapers. In the case of books, at least, he argued that the general $9.99 price point set initially by Amazon, was not only impossible to make any money, it also didn’t reflect the value of content. He said that Sony would seek a much more varied pricing model for the content sold on its e-reader devices.

Rafat adds: I was at the Sony press event this morning, and Thomson said that they are getting a better split with Sony than they are with Amazon, though he refused to get into specifics of it. Asked about the rationale for charging for NYP and Marketwatch when they’re free online, he said it is about convenience of the function, format and daily updates (in case of MarketWatch) that people will pay for. This isn’t the only such deal News Corp will get into, he hinted, but the companies did not disclose how long this specific “exclusive” deal will be.

From Sony’s perspective, on competition with Amazon, Stringer said: “We did fight a lonely battle for a while…we have obviously fallen behind Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN). We didn’t have a wireless reader. This brings us back into the next stage of the race.”