The move was foreshadowed earlier this year. Both The Nikkei in Japan and AllThingsD reported in early January that Apple had signed distribution deals with three big Japanese publishers.

In a press release sent out on Tuesday evening Eastern time, Apple notes that the Japanese iBookstore features “titles from major and independent publishers, including a great selection of books from Kodansha, KADOKAWA, Bungeishunju, Gakken and Gentosha. The iBookstore has a wide selection of emerging and established authors including Shyotaro Ikenami, Jiro Akagawa, Atsuko Asano and Ryu Murakami.”

The Japanese iBookstore is also offering enhanced ebooks and “digitally exclusive titles including Ryu Murakami’s fiction novels ‘At the Airport,’ ‘Exodus of Middle-School Students’ and ‘I’ll Always Be With You, Always’  which has interactive emails in each chapter to bring you even deeper into the story.”

The update notes for 3.1 say, “The iBookstore in Japan now has hundreds of thousands of books available for purchase, including fiction, manga, light novels and more.” In addition, the update says there are reading improvements for “a number of Asian languages,” though the specific languages are not specified.

The iBooks update is out now and can be downloaded via the App Store.

This post was updated at 8:17 p.m. ET on Tuesday, March 5 with additional details from Apple’s press release about the iBookstore’s launch.

The Indian sites will join Gawker’s new Spanish-language version of Gizmodo — which launched on Monday — as well as local versions of various Gawker sites that have launched in Brazil, Hungary and the United Kingdom. In some cases, as with India, the local sites are run by partners in that country, and consist of translated blog posts from the U.S. site as well as some local content created by those partners.

Gawker’s partner in Brazil — a media entity called F451 — runs native versions of four Gawker sites (Gizmodo, Kotaku, Jezebel and Jalopnik) while the company’s partner in Japan runs just a local version of Gizmodo. And in Hungary, the Gawker presence consists of a site called Cink.hu, which isn’t really a copy of any of the blog network’s other sites and is run by Laszlo Szily, who worked for Denton when the Gawker founder was a Financial Times correspondent in Hungary.

Gizmodo’s new Spanish site and the Hungarian site are new variations on the model because they aren’t based on partnerships with local operators like the Times of India — they are both owned and operated by the U.S. company, using staff who write in the other language (although both will also run translated versions of Gawker content). Some of the staff at Gizmodo’s new Spanish version are based in New York and others in Spain, a result of Gawker’s recent acquisition of a local Gawker-style site called Guanabee, whose founder now runs Gizmodo en Espanol.

Gawker wants international to be 20 percent of revenue

I asked Denton whether the company is expanding internationally because growth in the U.S. market has slowed and he said no — according to the Gawker CEO, the blog network says it expects to see 40-per-cent growth in 2013, an even faster rate than it saw in 2012, although Denton didn’t say whether that was revenue or some other metric (Update: Denton clarified to me via Twitter that he meant revenues). He also said he wants to take international revenues to 20 percent of Gawker’s sales from the 5-per-cent level they are at currently, and that international deals are much more lucrative for Gawker because the profit margins are higher,.

As for what comes next, Denton said China is the biggest hole in Gawker Media’s portfolio of international properties. The company has been trying to set something up there but hasn’t been able to find the right local partner yet, he said, and therefore it may need to publish Chinese content from somewhere outside the country if it wants to make inroads into that market.

Denton also said that the company’s new Kinja platform has been a big part of the expansion, since it allows Gawker sites to host more active conversations and discussions than the previous version — including discussions that are sponsored by advertisers. Gawker launched the new platform last year, and Denton told me in an interview at the time that the focus on discussions awas going to be a big part of the future of Gawker.

The timing of the launch is unclear. While The Nikkei says it could happen as early as this month, AllThingsD cites sources who say that’s “far too optimistic.”

Japan has been slow to embrace ebooks, with manga dominating the ebook market and publishers reluctant to digitize books in fear of cannibalization of print sales. (Publishing Perspectives has a lot of good coverage of the ebook transition in Japan.) But the arrival of other Western ebook retailers in the country should grease the wheels for Apple, and since the iPad’s market share in Japan is estimated around 60 percent, that should also help adoption of the platform.

The new regulations were passed in June, when the offence became a criminal rather than civil one, but only take effect from now.

In many countries around the world, approaching piracy has been balancing out in to a mix of graduated-response action (education, bandwidth throttling, sometimes disconnection), website takedowns and better legal content services. But Japan’s move is significantly more draconian.

Sony Music Unlimited was the first major streaming service to launch in the country this July – years after others in countries elsewhere.

BBC News: “The Recording Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ) had pushed for the move, suggesting that illegal media downloads outnumbered legal ones by about a factor of 10.

“The figure is based on a 2010 study which suggested that people in the country downloaded about 4.36 billion illegally pirated music and video files and 440 million purchased ones that year.”

Half-year internet music sales in Japan were 133 percent higher than a year earlier, according to RIAJ, while mobile music sales rose 63 percent and internet music subscriptions were 102 percent higher.

The Nexus 7, on sale in Japan via the Google Play website today, will sell for 19,800 yen (about $254) in Japan. Buyers also get a 2,000-yen credit to the Google Play store. Reuters reports:

Japan has rapidly embraced the smartphone, with devices running Google’s Android operating system tripling in the past year, according to Google. Google said that Japan now ranks third in terms of downloaded applications from its Play store.

Reuters also says that in addition to rental movies, Google will sell movies from Sony and Paramount to customers in Japan.

In addition to Japan, Google ebooks are now available in the U.S., Canada, Australia, Germany, Spain, Italy, France and, as of earlier this month, South Korea. Kobo, owned by Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten, launched in Japan in July. Amazon is expected to launch the Kindle e-reader in Japan in October.

“Each SNL episode will be available in English hours after the initial US Broadcast. Japanese subtitles will be made available a few days later.”

Extended release windows for U.S. shows abroad have long been blamed for a lot of TV show piracy, and this deal shows one interesting approach to make content available legally.

However, don’t expect most other shows to become available in a similar fashion anytime soon: Hulu didn’t license Saturday Night Live from NBC, but struck the deal directly with the show’s independent production company Broadway Video. Hollywood’s major studios may be a little more hesitant to give up international windowing just yet. Case in point: Many of Hulu Japan’s other agreements, including a deal with HBO, only cover previous seasons.

The other question of course is how easily content like Saturday Night Live is going to translate to international audiences, even with localized subtitles. Hulu Japan focused heavily on U.S. content when it launched in the country with a subscription-only offering a year ago. It has since added a lot of Japanese content as well as reduced its monthly fees to attract more users, but recent reports indicate that Hulu’s investors haven’t been overly enthusiastic about Hulu’s international ambitions.

Crunchyroll began as a labor of love five years ago, when its founders were still working for Slide Inc. The site initially adopted a YouTube-like model, asking users to upload clips, many of which were Anime and other unlicensed Asian content. Crunchyroll’s team radically changed course in 2009, deleting all user-submitted content and instead striking licensing agreements with TV networks and studios in Japan. That complete reboot went remarkably well, said Kun, given the fact that sites like Mininova struggled with similar strategies. “It was a very different transition to us,” he recalled.

Part of the reason was that the Anime fan community was underserved. The only way to legitimately get access to many popular shows was to buy DVDs months or even years after episodes first aired in Japan. That’s why most fans got their Anime fix from unlicensed sites, where so-called fansub groups would post videos with English subtitles transcribed and translated by enthusiasts. “Piracy was just rampant,” said Kun.

Crunchyroll viewed this as an opportunity and struck deals with rights holders, and lots of them: Today, the service shows between 80 and 85 percent of all Anime content that airs in Japan, Kun told me, adding: “We legitimized an iTunified the Anime space.” And most of that content is available on the site the same day it airs on TV in Japan – to premium subscribers anyway, who pay between $7 and $12 per month, and in turn also get to enjoy videos in HD. Free users on the other hand have to wait a week for their Naruto Shippuden fix.

Part of getting to 100,000 paying subscribers has also been Crunchyroll’s embrace of new platforms, some of which are limited to paying subscribers as well. Crunchyroll doesn’t just have its own apps for iOS, Android and Windows phone, but also Roku, Boxee, Google TV and the Playstation 3 – a platform that Kun is especially proud about: “We are literally the only startup on the Playstation,” he told me.

So what’s next for Crunchyroll? Kun told me that the company is eyeing other territories after localizing the service for Latin America earlier this year. And then there’s the idea to add other niches to Crunchyroll’s service. Kun didn’t want to reveal any details yet, but said that the hyper-targeted approach with perks like same-day access would work for other things as well. “We think it’s very applicable to other content verticals,” he told me.

Crunchyroll is based in San Francisco and has an office in Tokyo. The company employs around 30 people, and has raised around $8.5 $7 million from Venrock, Bitway and strategic content partner TV Tokyo.

Image: Sony

They may be each other’s respective home electronics nemeses – but, for Sony’s digital content offerings, Apple’s iOS is actually the Japanese giant’s fourth most important platform.

Already available on Sony and Android devices, the Sony Music Unlimited subscription service – part of the cloud-based Sony Entertainment Network alongside PlayStation Network and Video Unlimited – launched on iOS in May and has a million active monthly users. After making some changes this week, Michael Aragon, VP and GM of Sony’s global digital video and music services, tells paidContent:

“It would be irresponsible for us not to address the fact that we have a lot of loyal Sony users who love iPhone; it would be punishing them. Android and iOS make it easier for us to reach the masses.”

If it succeeds, Sony Entertainment Network could realise Sony’s long-held dreams of uniting content and hardware under one roof. But the reality is that Sony now lags rivals in key product categories like mobile and tablet. Going over the top of those devices is, therefore, crucial. But that doesn’t necessarily mean Sony will distribute its content over any future Apple TV, Aragon tells me:

“We watch what everybody’s doing. There are a lot of very formidable competitors out there, not just Apple.

“It’s still such an early market, we have a few things in the works that are just focused on what we do well; I can’t disclose any of that.

“How we differentiate is, Sony has a global presence in these services.  We’re definitely the only company that has devices in homes or on the go that cover the things you would do in your everyday life. How do we think of them as one service rather than three services?”

Sounds like Sony could a single super-subscription to Sony Entertainment Network’s game, music and video trinity, rather than the current, distinct trio. Could the network also add other content categories, like e-books?

“Bundling, from a product persecutive and from a consumer perspective, are definitely things we are excited about,” Aragon replies.

“We’re evaluating – do we create an API for an app platform? Game, video and music are the big ones, but there are certainly opportunities.”

Building Sony’s digital content ambitions has not been an easy task. Aragon has had to coalesce disparate business units in to a coherent consumer offering, but PSN suffered a debilitating hack attack and the whole kaboodle was last year rebranded from the confusing “Qriocity” name after just a year.

“We have over 100 million accounts globally right now. We’ll be close to a billion-dollar business very soon,” Aragon says.

“We’re the first substantial subscription music service in Japan – we beat Spotify and others to market, which is quite an important thing for us.”

Aragon’s determination not to let the big boys of subscription digital content, like Netflix and Spotify, get their way was borne out by tweaking the Sony Music Unlimited offering this week. The free-trial window has been doubled to 60 days, and a new half-price tier of £4.99-per-month introduced for customers who want their music only on PS3 and PC. That shows Aragon needs to work harder to convince more people to test the offering.

“It’s probably the longest trial on the market,” he says. “This service is very new. Data is proving what we thought – it takes people a little while to figure out the whole on-demand subscription thing.

“We don’t want an extremely long conversion time, because this is not a ‘free’ service – but we need to give enough time so people understand a lot of the benefits. They’re so conditioned to syncing their music from device to device.”

Neither Sony nor its rivals will get to succeed with over-the-top connected TV content if actual consumer connection rates are low, as many analysts say.

Aragon says Sony is giving its new TV buyers around $50 worth in internet video content when they open the box, conditioning them to go online with their television.

“In Europe, especially, we’ve seen quite a bit of uptake in connected TVs – a little bit more than the U.S., which is surprising in some respects.

“In Europe, we have better connect rates and usage than other countries.”

The e-commerce firm says Kobo Touch has become the top-selling product on Rakuten’s large online mall after going on pre-order sale July 2 ahead of its July 19 service launch.

At the same time, Kobo has announced a partnership with Italian retailer Mondadori Group to bring its device to Italy in its ongoing globalisation effort.

The Japanese and Italian experiences certainly show Kobo has a knack of brokering good local carriage partnerships. Mondadori online media stores carry over nine million products.

In the UK, Kobo grabbed a deal with high street newsagent WH Smith last year to sell its e-readers on prominent display stands. But, asked for sales this week by paidContent, Kobo and WH Smith declined to give numbers.

In countries like France and Italy, e-books are still relatively sparsely adopted; it is still a market waiting to take off. Kobo CEO Mike Serbinis puts the Italian e-book market at €10 million last year.

Kobo is also available in the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Austria, Germany and France.

Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten, which acquired the e-book company this year and led a $100 million investment in Pinterest in May, is now putting both North American services to work in its home country…

The firm, which wants to leverage Pinterst to yield social commerce, has added Pinterest’s “Pin It” button to its Rakuten Travel, Rakuten Recipe and Rakuten Ichiba e-tail sites, allowing shoppers to share items they fancy. (Announcement).

And Rakuten, whose product pages already included share buttons for Facebook, Twitter, Mixi and Google+, promises further “plans to accelerate the rollout of Pinterest’s services in Japan”.

Meanwhile, Kobo’s Touch e-reader has gone on pre-order for sales from July 19, costing ¥7,980 ($100).

The company’s e-bookstore, going live on rakuten.co.jp’s domain, will carry 30,000 Japanese-language titles amongst a total 2.4 million – 100,000 fewer than Kobo in other countries – and will include Japanese comic books. (Announcement).

Rakuten, whose core area has been straight-up e-tail, looks like becoming a force in fuelling that segment with digital content and social.