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.

While the Philippines is admittedly a Friendster country, my recent experience with social networking sites shows that Facebook is also now gaining Pinoy members. Both social network sites already have their own mobile interface that allows cellphone users to login to their account.

Recognizing Facebook’s huge membership — having been “recently ranked by M:Metrics as one of the sites people visit most often on their mobile devices” — Palm created Facebook for Palm.

I downloaded and tried to install it on my Treo 650, but it isn’t compatible with my device. Facebook for Palm is supposed to work with Palm Centro, Treo 755p and Treo 680 smartphones.

Here are more details about Facebook for Palm from the official Palm blog:

You can use Facebook for Palm to:

• Send and receive messages
• View and post status updates
• View and post photos from your smartphone
• See your friends’ profiles and photos
• Read and write Wall posts
• View News Feed
• Upload videos taken from your Palm smartphone
• Use a mobile “Contacts” tab that aggregates friends phone numbers – view your list of friends and dial or text them directly

Maybe Palm could also come up with Friendster for Palm and Orkut for Palm for its customers in Asia and South America, respectively.

I didn’t know that there is a way to run Palm applications on Windows Mobile devices until I read about StyleTap’s official announcement of its plan to come up with a version for iPhone.

StyleTap Platform, I learned, is a mobile software that enables thousands of applications written for Palm OS to run on other devices. Styletap for WM has long been available, while a version for Symbian is already in beta testing. The iPhone version will be released this July.

A free 14-day trial of StyleTap Platform may be downloaded for free on its official website. A registered copy costs US $49.95.

Isn’t it great to know that you may enjoy the wifi capability of WM and Apple devices and still run your favorite Palm apps on it?

Juliana of Handycase.com e-mailed me this morning to inform me about the Palm OS freeware on their site. I checked it out and I found interesting — and best of all, free — Palm games and utilities.

Their free games include a series of IPuzzle Basic games, Logic Puzzle, Roman Table, Illusion Cubes, JoQPo, HandMemory, Stonestris and Triball. I downloaded and installed IPuzzle Basic edition 6 and Stonestris. IPuzzle is basically a sliding puzzle where you move squares one at a time to to correctly complete an image. Stonestris, is — of course — a tetris game. Handycase games may not be as crisp as the usual commercial ones, but they are still worth trying.

Other freeware from them include HandTube, a utility for YouTube users; HandClock, an analog clock; Priorities, an app that organizes your priorities; FreeContacts, a contacts and reminder suite; HandDraw, a paint-type app for Palm; TopicList, a to-do-list-type app that organizes information and tasks; and HandWriter, a text editor.

Handycase also offers a diverse line of commercial software for personal, professionals and corporate use.

Here are two Palm downloads that are useful and timely as the Christian World observes Holy Week:

• Palm Bible Plus
• World English Bible for Bible+

Just download the files, then save it to the Launcher folder on your SD card. For more info, visit the Palm Bible+ website.