Twilight ebooks on sale at eReader.com

Ebook version of the titles in Stephenie Meyer’s very popular Twilight Series are now on sale at eReader.com. The Twilight books tell the love story of Bella, a unique high school girl, and Edward, a perfect hunk who happens to be a vampire.

eReader, which describes itself as “The World’s Largest eBookstore,” is my favorite ebookstore. I bought my soft copy of “The Google Story” there. It also offers free downloads of the eReader software, which smartphone users may use to read ebooks on their Palm OS, Symbian, WinMobile,  Apple and other mobile devices.

“The newsletter says eReader offers 25% discount, but my computation — if I remember my Math correctly — reveals that the price cut is actually around 34%. Here is the list of old and new prices:

• Twilight (Twilight Series Book 1) from $10.99 to $8.21
• New Moon (Twilight Series Book 2) from $10.99 to $8.21
• Eclipse (Twilight Series Book 3) from $19.99 to $14.93 (34% off)
• Breaking Dawn (The Twilight Saga Book 4) from $22.99 to $17.17 (34% off)

A spokeswoman for Meyer said that in less than three years, the first three books in the series sold 6.5 million copies in the United States alone. According to a New York Times report, “Breaking Dawn,” the fourth and final installment, sold 1.3 million copies in its first 24 hours on sale.

NYT columnist Gail Collins read the first two novels and tried to search for the key to the series’ success. “The attraction is clearly the vampire hero, who is a perfect entleman, eternally faithful and — as the author points out repeatedly — quite a hunk,” she writes.  She then lifts some description of the vampire: “He lay perfectly still in the grass, his shirt open over his sculpted, incandescent chest, his scintillating arms bare … A perfect statue, carved in some unknown stone, smooth like marble, glittering like crystal.”

Like Harry Potter — whose story captivated millions of children and adults in the world with its last book selling 8.3 million copies on the first day — the Twilight books encourages young people to read. Collins notes: “Before you make fun of this, I want you to seriously consider whether you’re interested in denigrating people who spend their leisure time actually reading books rather than watching ‘America’s Got Talent'”.

In its review of the first book in the series, Amazon.com writes that “the precision and delicacy of Meyer’s writing lifts this wonderful novel beyond the limitations of the horror genre to a place among the best of [young adult] fiction.”

Read the first chapter of the first book on NYT.