With the demand of tablets and e-book readers reaching record heights this Christmas season and competition being tough, manufactures are giving out huge discounts to attract customers to their products. Sunday, Barnes & Noble slashed prices of the Nook Simple Touch permanently while Amazon offered a $50 discount on their Kindle Fire HD on Monday only.

The Nook Simple Touch is $20 lesser than what it previously was. On Sunday, Barnes & Noble slashed prices of the Nook Simple Touch (without GlowLight) from $99 to $79 and this is a permanent change of price. This slash of price brings the price down to just $10 more than the cheapest Kindle device which is available at $69. The extra $10 includes "a touchscreen, one feature the base Kindle doesn't have, and it doesn't come with advertising."

Apart from that the other specifications of both devices are pretty much the same. However, the Nook offers a memory card slot that supports up to 32BG storage space.

On the second Monday of December, better known as Green Monday, Amazon offered a $50 discount on its Kindle Fire HD making the 16GB Wi-Fi only version available for $250 and the 32GB Wi-Fi + 4G version available for $450. However, the sales were restricted to one piece per customer and conditions of the discount included "while supplies last".

Green Monday is a phrase originally coined by eBay which is yet another day for customers to save money while shopping during the festive season. Despite the existence of other sales-heavy days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, many retailers have reported a sharp increase in sales on Green Monday too.

According to a report on PC World, Walmart saw its highest sales figure on 2011 on Greenday. The website also quoted online metrics firm comScore saying that in 2011, Green day was the "third biggest spending day of the holiday season."