Kobo still reigns in Canadian ebook retailing, with almost 30 percent of the market, but Amazon is making moves to try and chip away at the company’s lead.

As a report in PaidContent notes, “Amazon announced Wednesday that it is releasing the Kindle Paperwhite in the country for the first time and will also sell the basic Kindle there, allowing Canadian shoppers to avoid international shipping fees and delays.”

Amazon launched a Canadian version of its Kindle store in December 2012.

Peter Larsen, VP Kindle, tells Huffington Post Canada that “In every country where we’ve launched the Kindle e-reading ecosystem, it’s very quickly become the best-selling device in that country, and we’re cautiously optimistic that that same thing will happen in Canada.”

Will Canadians buy the devices? As the PaidContent report notes, Kindle already has 19 percent of the Canadian ebook market. But Canadian customers may well stay loyal to Kobo, which was founded in Canada and maintains a large retail partner in Chapters Indigo, which still retails the device even though it sold Kobo to Japanese electronics firm Rakuten in January 2012.