14 DAY TRIAL // The announcement that Yahoo! and Adobe would be teaming up to test out a new ad system inside PDF documents was vastly looked over back in November when it was announced. Not because it did not have potential, but rather because it was just another way of feeding ads to the Internet users and that's what they have already had enough of.
What wasn't so clear was regarding the fact that the e-books benefiting from this technology, if I may call it that, would be free for download because they would be ad supported, so this meant that many quality books would find their way free into your computer, without having to go through the whole card validation process and waiting, in case you were ordering online.
The first book to benefit from the joint venture is here and it is yours to download and see what the partnership brought new to the online (and offline, I guess) advertising table. It's called True Films, written by Kevin Kelly, and it is basically a list of 200 documentaries that "you must see before you die", with a short description and all the rest. I won't dwell on the content for too long, because that's what you'll be doing after the download.
The ads are optional, mind you that. Kevin Kelly says about them that "These ads are inserted into the PDF by Adobe (using the Yahoo ad network) when you open the file. Like Google Adsense ads, they are contextual. That is, Adobe/Yahoo tries to match the content of the ads with the content of text on the the pages, in my case, text about documentaries. The ads I see at this moment of writing are mostly about apartment rentals, but they change each time one opens the book. The way Adobe/Yahoo 'knows' about the content of the PDF is not by crawling the web, but by the author (me in this case) submitting the PDF to their machine the first time, which then stamps it with a registration code, so it can remember what's in it when someone far away opens it on their machine."
What else can I say? Enjoy the reading!