Kevin Kelly's "True Films" 3.0 free e-book download

[TadW]

This is the third version of a guide I have been developing for the past 5 years. It takes the 200 best documentaries I have reviewed on my website True Films and puts them into one handy book

Download link

This one is quite interesting, even if you are not into the history of movies:

I am offering this 200-page full-color guide (perfect as a companion if you have Netflix) as a FREE download. It's in PDF format, but with a twist. To help offset the significant bandwidth costs of these downloads (I hope my server can take the wave), I have appended advertisements to the PDF book. ...

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.

You can read more about Ads for Adobe PDF in this thread.

[Alexander Turcic]

I am using the Foxit Reader to read PDF documents on my Windows machine. With it, I see no ads whatsoever when I open this book (I tried it a couple of days ago).

[gwynevans]

I wonder how he'll do, as they're (a) opt-in and (b) Adobe Reader 8-only...