The tablets were already available in the U.K., Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Japan (as well as the U.S., of course). While a 4G version of the Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ is available in the U.S., only Wi-Fi versions are available internationally.

“Kindle Fire HD is the #1 best-selling item in the world for Amazon since its launch, and we’re thrilled to make it available to even more customers around the globe today,” Dave Limp, VP Kindle, said in a statement.

In the U.S., the 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HD, which is Amazon’s answer to the iPad, got a big price cut in March. The 4G, 32 GB version, which had been $499, was cut to $399. The Wi-Fi-only version of the same tablet got a price cut of $30 — to $269 for the 16 GB version and $299 for the 32 GB version. Internationally, prices will vary based on operating costs.

Kobo makes four devices: The 5-inch Kobo Mini e-reader, for $79.99; the touchscreen Kobo Touch e-reader, for $99.99; the front-lit Kobo Glo e-reader, for $129.99; and the Kobo Arc Android tablet, for $199.99. Last year, the company stopped selling them through its website and only made them available through chains like Target and Best Buy as well as the independent bookstores that Kobo partners with through the American Booksellers Association.

A Kobo spokesman told me that last year, the company’s “top priority” was to “meet the demand of holiday shoppers around the world. As such, we paid close attention to our distribution channels to ensure that our retail partners were fully stocked for the busy buying season.We established a distribution process that runs very well, and were very happy with our end-of-year results, with Kobo’s E Ink eReader sales up nearly 150 percent in December. To further expand on our offerings and to provide customers with another place to purchase we are now offering our world-class devices and accessories through Kobo.com.”

Kobo says it has 13 million readers worldwide. The company launched in Brazil, Portugal, Italy, Japan, Spain, South Africa and the Netherlands in 2012 and plans to head to Russia, India and China in 2013. In the United States, its share of the ebook market is small and lags behind Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Apple.

An earlier version of this article implied that Kobo had begun selling devices through its website for the first time. In fact, The Digital Reader notes that the company had once sold devices on its website, stopped last year and has now started to do so again.

The piece was updated with a comment from Kobo on Tuesday afternoon.

At paidContent Live on April 17 in New York City, we’ll be exploring how book publishers are adapting their business models for a digital age and rolling out new products designed to take advantage of e-readers, tablets and smartphones. I’ll be interviewing executives from three publishers handling the transition in particularly interesting ways: Dominique Raccah, the publisher and CEO of Sourcebooks; Rachel Chou, the chief marketing officer at Open Road Media; and Evan Ratliff, founder and CEO of Atavist. Here’s a peek at some of the issues we’ll be discussing.

• New payment models: Last spring, Sourcebooks rolled out a romance ebook club, Discover a New Love, that gives members DRM-free ebooks, discounts and access to special events for $9.99 every six months. And Atavist is now offering in-app subscriptions to its e-singles. I’ll be asking Raccah and Ratliff what they’ve learned about their readers and pricing and tips on how other publishers can enact subscription models.
• The enhanced ebook now: Enhanced ebooks got a bad rap a few years ago, when it was uncertain whether readers would pay more for an ebook that included a few videos and photos. But with the increased adoption of tablets and cheaper technology, publishers are finding new ways to integrate digital media into their books. I’ll be asking our panelists about their best practices in this area: How do they decide which bells and whistles to add and which to avoid, and when’s it best to just go with straight text?
• New frontiers of marketing: “Discoverability” is the buzzword on lots of publishers’ lips, but how does it translate into practice — and is it actually a problem for readers? Raccah, Ratliff and Chou will speak about the ways that they are marketing their books online and how they’re working with retailers to promote their titles.

Let me know what else you want to talk about! Sign up to attend the paidContent Live conference on April 17 in NYC here, and in the comments of this post, I’d love to hear your burning digital book publishing questions.

The offer applies at Barnes & Noble retail and college stores, online, and third-party retailers Walmart, Best Buy and Target. The Nook HD+ tablet, which has a 9-inch screen and is Barnes & Noble’s answer to Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD, is $269 for the 16 GB model and $299 for the 32 GB model. The Nook Simple Touch is normally $79.

Jamie Iannone, president of digital products at Nook Media (the spinoff of Barnes & Noble’s digital and college businesses, which was completed in October and includes investments from Microsoft and Pearson), said in a statement that the two-for-one deal lets customers “fully experience all that the expansive Nook Store of more than 3 million titles has to offer.” The idea is that tablet users who are coming to the Nook HD+ for its “movies, apps, magazines and more” — though it’s unclear how many people actually want these things from Nook, especially following the launch of the iPad Mini) — might stick around and buy some ebooks if they have a device to do so. (Of course, they can also read ebooks on a Nook Tablet.)

The deal might just be intended to get rid of Nook e-readers — it’s possible that Barnes & Noble wants to focus on the Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight going forward. It may also be Barnes & Noble’s effort to compete with Amazon, which recently slashed the price of the 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HD, bringing the WiFi versions price in line with the Nook HD+.

Speaking at the D: Dive Into Media conference in Southern California on Tuesday, Hearst Magazines President David Carey said that 10-inch screens appealed to men for magazine content but that women were reluctant to embrace them. The 7-inch screen such as those found on the Nook or iPad, however, is leading to a surge in female subscribers.

Still, overall tablet figures are hardly overwhelming. Despite the fact that 40 percent of Hearst’s traffic is coming through mobile sites, tablets still account for only three percent of overall revenue; Carey says he hopes to get that figure to 10 percent by 2016. (Note: we’ll be exploring new revenue models for media at paidContent Live in April). Carey had predicted Hearst would reach 1 million digital subscribers by the start of this year but the number came in closer to 800,000.

In the meantime, traditional print magazines will continue to occupy a primary role in Hearst’s business. Carey says that perceptions of magazines have been tarred by the dramatic decline of newspapers. He argues that the ongoing popularity of print magazines with young women as well as their general brand strength means Hearst is in a good position.

Carey also praised Apple’s role in teaching consumers to buy online content. In response to a question about Apple’s control over consumer data, he said this isn’t a problem since 65 percent of readers volunteer to share such data.

“We’re now seeing the transition we’ve been expecting,” CEO Jeff Bezos said in the company’s fourth-quarter earnings report, released Tuesday. “After five years, ebooks is a multi-billion dollar category for us and growing fast – up approximately 70 percent last year. In contrast, our physical book sales experienced the lowest December growth rate in our 17 years as a book seller, up just five percent.”

That’s impressive growth, but as the ebook transition moves forward, Amazon should worry that Kindle is not going to be the device leading the revolution. Apple and iPad will cut into its growth.

Amazon has mastered the art of the press release that doesn’t say much. Several data points are missing from Bezos’s statement — here are some questions I have:

• What’s Amazon’s actual ebook revenue? The company’s worldwide media sales were $19.9 billion in 2012; what percentage of that came from ebooks, and what percentage came from print books?
• What was print book growth for the entire year — and for past years? Bezos refers to annual ebook sales, but print book sales for just one month. Print books are also starting from a much larger base; they make up over 70 percent of trade book sales in the U.S.
• Which ebook categories are growing the fastest?
• Where’s the ebook growth coming from? 70 percent growth is a lot. Is most of it coming from within the U.S. or internationally? And is it coming from owners of Amazon devices — Kindle e-readers and Kindle Fire tablets — or is it coming from iPad and other tablet owners reading ebooks with Kindle apps?

Amazon’s not going to answer those questions (though I did ask them), but they’re important in part because U.S. book publishers are reporting slowing sales of adult ebooks: What was once triple-digit growth has fallen to the double digits. The revolution has also been largely limited to text-based titles — adult fiction and nonfiction — and categories like cookbooks and travel haven’t seen nearly as much growth from ebooks.

If the digital market for certain kinds of books is settling, as it appears to be, Amazon will have to find growth in other areas (though it doesn’t have to, and likely can’t, sustain 70 percent ebook growth for long). The company can expand Kindle internationally, as it’s been doing already, and it can still grab a certain number of ebook newbies.

Eventually, though, Amazon will have to tackle the genres that have remained rooted in print — children’s books and heavily illustrated books like cookbooks, coffee-table books and the huge textbook market. The company clearly sees potential on the children’s front: It’s launched new children’s book imprints and offerings like Kindle Free Time Unlimited. And Kindle Format 8 supports HTML5 and illustrated content.

But the biggest company it has to compete with in this area is Apple. Publishers of heavily illustrated content — both traditional publishers and digital-focused startups — are likely to focus on developing for iPad first, since it’s by far the most popular tablet. The next five years of the ebook revolution are not going to look like the first five.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock / Stacie Stauff Smith Photography 

This turns the Kindle Fire into a potentially lucrative product for Amazon, even though most believe it sells the Kindle Fire products near cost, if not below it. Even better: The combination of decreasing hardware prices over time and a rise in content sales — think apps, movies, books, music — will help the product line even more, according to Markkanen:

“Considering the probable margins of app and content sales, our research shows that Kindle Fire is a credible proposition. We expect that there will be a certain level of ‘innovation plateauing’ in mobile hardware taking place over the next five years, and that would certainly work in Amazon’s favor. Its future devices are likely to require less cross-subsidy than the ones we’ve seen so far.”

Markkanen may not have the exact figure for content profits required, but you can bet Amazon does. And this may be why the company wanted to retain control over mobile app pricing when it launched its alternative Appstore. By understanding consumer preferences perhaps better than any other online retailer, Amazon knows the right pricing “mix” for content sales to make money off hardware sales.

The big beneficiary of this ebook reading increase appears to be tablets, which have overtaken e-reader ownership for the first time in Pew’s surveys. While ownership of e-readers has grown to 19 percent from 10 percent a year ago, tablet ownership is now up to 25 percent, up from 10 percent a year ago. Overall, one-third (33 percent) of Americans now own an e-reading device, either e-reader or tablet, compared to 18 percent of Americans a year ago.

The Pew Survey, which polled 2,252 Americans in October and November, doesn’t break down exactly how much reading is actually taking place on tablets versus e-readers so it’s possible that e-readers are still more popular for actual reading of ebooks. But the report falls in line with other reports that suggest that the e-reader is set to decline in the face of more versatile tablets.

IHS Suppli said earlier this month that ebook readers peaked in 2011 and were expected to decline by 36 percent in 2012 to 14.9 million units, down from 23.2 million in 2011. IHS forecast that e-readers shipments will drop to 7.1 million by 2016. Meanwhile, tablets are expected to grow to 203 million shipments by 2013, up from 70 million last year.

The rise in ebook reading comes as traditional paper book reading declines. Pew found that 67 percent of Americans 16 and up read a printed book in the last year, compared to 72 percent a year ago. It’s not surprising that ebook reading is up. It’s just more convenient for many readers. And with tablets only accelerating in sales thanks to smaller units like the iPad Mini, there’s less need to rely on a dedicated reader.

The news wasn’t surprising as the company said in September 2011 that it planned to split its more profitable financial services division from its education arm. And earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and others reported that a deal with Apollo was in the works. According to McGraw-Hill, the deal is expected to close in late 2012 or early 2013.

As the rise of digital content disrupts the publishing business, McGraw-Hill Education has attempted to keep pace with new products like its adaptive learning platform LearnSmart and partnerships with digital distributors like Apple, as well as startups Kno, Benchprep and others. Despite its efforts, the company’s education unit has lagged behind its financial services division. In the last quarter, for example, revenue for the unit fell 11 percent to $836 million. In its quarterly report, the company said the growth in sales of digital products across all product lines and the migration to more subscription-based business models impacted revenue.

Wall Street responded favorably to the news – after the announcement of the sale, shares in McGraw-Hill climbed about 2.35 percent to $52.90. Once the deal is closed, McGraw-Hill will be renamed McGraw Hill Financial.

As Bloomberg notes, McGraw-Hill Education’s sale isn’t the first time private equity has dabbled in education. In 2007, London-based Apax Partners led a $7.75 billion purchase of Cengage Learning Inc. from Thompson Reuters Corp, the financial news outlet reported.

As we and others have reported, tablets and other digital devices, along with the growth in open content initiatives and other textbook creation tools, are dramatically changing the landscape for traditional textbook publishers.

This summer, in a conversation with reporters, Jay Chakrapani, vice president and general manager of digital at McGraw-Hill Higher Education, said that the company wants to be the “Netflix of education.”

Through its digital products, LearnSmart, especially, he said, the company gathers increasing data about its students, enabling them to personalize learning experiences much like Netflix personalizes recommendations over time. Going forward, it will be interesting to see if Apollo takes a similar view on the future of McGraw-Hill Education.