When buying a book for the Cybook Gen3, what is the difference between a MobiPocket Book (MP) AND A MobiPocket Book (OD).

Can I purchase and read one of these formats in the MobiPocket Reader on my PC without purchaseing a Cybook Gen3?

Where did you see those acronyms?

Where did you see those acronyms?

I saw them on BooksOnBoard.com as available formats for a book called "Double Cross" by James Patterson. I also notices and eReader format for that book as well.

eReader is definitely not compatible with MobiPocket. I'm not sure what's MP an OD, could be different publishers... I expect they both should be compatible with both Cybook and PC reader.

Reading the site, they appear to be different sources for MobiPocket books. The site allows you to register a different group of Mobi PIDs for "MP" and "OD" books.

What I want to know is do one of these Mobipocket formats (OD or MP) give decent sized images?

OD was mentioned in this thread:

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=12951&page=8

"BooksOnBoard just turned up with some Mobipocket titles that can be downloaded right now. They're labeled Mobipocket OD. OD must be for Overdrive."

What I want to know is do one of these Mobipocket formats (OD or MP) give decent sized images?

Why do you have such a bee in your bonnet about images, Jon? In how many books are images of vital importance to the reading experience? In most cases, images come out acceptably in a Mobi book.

actually images are vital to the reading experience nowadays. consumers are used to web pages, and text-only pages compete against pages with graphics.

For me, I am working on a book of erotic short stories containing tasteful images. obviously the text is the most important part of the story, but the images provide an extra thing to focus on. The big advantage to ebooks over print books is the fact that illustrations don't add to the cost of the ebook.

that said, from what i read on mobileread these days, image support is improving, which is encouraging.

I was also wondering what "OD books" stands for on booksonboard.com, and I got this reply from their support:

MP and OD are designations for different sources for the books. The formats themselves are identical and are the standard Mobipocket format, OD is distributed to us through a source in Cleveland, Ohio, and requires one process for PID set up. MP comes to us from Amazon/Mobipocket in Paris and requires a different process for PID setup. We went to the duplicate sourcing when Amazon's Mobipocket server went down for ten days in August, leaving our customers no way to download their Mobipocket ebooks. At that time, we exchanged many of them for OD books to keep our customers reading.

I guess there is not much of the difference which one you buy, until one of the servers in Cleveland or Paris goes down. :)