Is News Corp. (NWS) developing its own rival to the Kindle, or isn't it? Earlier this year, chairman Rupert Murdoch revealed that the company was in talks to invest in the development of an e-reader along the lines of Amazon's popular device. And as recently as today, TheStreet.com, which interviewed Murdoch last week, was still reporting that a News Corp. e-reader was "a year or two" from becoming reality.

But on Fox Business Network today, he seemed to change his tune in answer to a question about whether News Corp. is "getting into the hardware business as opposed to just purely the content business."
"I don't think that's likely," Murdoch told anchor Stuart Varney. "We're looking and talking to a lot of laboratories and big companies around the world like Sony, Fujitsu, Samsung. We're all working on wireless readers for books or for newspapers or for magazines."

But, he said, News Corp., which owns The Wall Street Journal, the Times of London and many other papers, "will be absolutely neutral. We're very happy to have our products distributed over any device provided it's only going to subscribers who are paying for it."