water for elephants (the mystery of the book cover)

i was going through kinokuniya's shelves yesterday. i wasn't really going to buy anything, just browsing and making mental notes of what i'll be downloading in my kindle.

on the "must-read"shelf was sarah gruen's "water for elephants" with this book cover:

this was selling for 17SGD.

Because I didn't want to imagine Robert Pattinson while reading the book, I walked further along to the "Literature" section and found two more versions of the book, with different covers.

this was priced at 21.94SGD

while this was selling for 23.20 SGD.

so that's three different book covers for just one book, with almost a six dollar difference between the first one and the one with the original book design.

obviously, it's a marketing ploy to get more people to buy. i see a lot of twilight fans grabbing that copy.
kindle still wins, though. at about 7USD, which is still almost half the price of any paperback/hardcover version.

has anyone seen the movie? i purposely didn't watch this when it ran in singapore because i wanted to read the book first.