A new system announced by Adobe and Yahoo could dramatically increase the attractiveness of placing ads in ebooks.
The two companies have announced a partnership to provide technology that will allow dynamic ads to appear in PDF documents. Until now, only static ads can be placed inside PDF documents but the new system the two companies are developing will allow changing and context-sensitive ads to be placed inside the ebook and regularly changed. The PDF file can be downloaded from websites or delivered by email though ads will only appear if the reader is connected to the internet.
Participating publishers submit their PDF documents to Adobe which analyses its content and embeds appropriate context sensitive ads. The ads are served by Yahoo which also handles payments to publishers. The companies have opened the system up to a public beta test program.