Stephenie Meyer's 'The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner' tops best-seller lists in U.S. and U.K.

Twilight fans are, unsurprisingly, sinking their fangs into/slaking their thirst with/insert vampire pun here for Stephenie Meyer’s The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner. The new novella currently tops USA Today’s best-seller list and Little, Brown estimates they have already sold 700,000 copies in the United States. Deadline reports that that the British bookstore chain Waterstones expects to sell more copies of Bree Tanner than of any other book this year.

You’d think we’d be immune to being impressed by the monomaniacal buying patterns of Twilight fans, and you’d be right. Bree Tanner is only 192 pages, a fraction of the length of the author’s last book. But I supposed a small fix of Twilight is better than no fix at all.

What really makes Bree Tanner‘s sales remarkable, though, is the fact that the novella is also available for free online at BreeTanner.com until July 5 (the site does not permit you to print the text or to download it to an e-reader, so you have to click through the virtual pages on your computer screen). That means fans of the series are standing in line and shelling out their money in droves for something they could consume without opening their wallets. Even so, Little, Brown estimates that only 75,000 people have read the book in its entirety on the website.