“The book industry is in better shape than it ever has been and it’s due to ebooks,” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos told an audience on Tuesday in a wide-ranging interview that addressed the company’s drone plans, its campus culture and its indifference to pain of short-term shareholders.

Speaking at a BusinessInsider event in New York, Bezos downplayed [company]Amazon’s[/company] recent high-profile spat with publisher Hachette as a run-of-the-mill fight with a supplier, adding that it’s the essential job of any retailer to fight for the best price for its customers.

As for the publishing industry and its authors, Bezos argued that $30 is too high a price for books, and that lower prices will lead to more readers, which will in turn benefit everyone. And in a remark that may have been intended to head off antitrust arguments, he urged people to consider book prices in the context of a larger entertainment market.

“Books don’t…