Every year or so my friend Kevin Kelly releases an updated version of his book-length True Films guide to the best documentaries. He’s done it in print (through Lulu and Amazon) and he’s done it as a cheap ebook download from the True Films site.

This year he’s doing something new. He’s released the book as a special pdf that, when read with Adobe Acrobat 8, shows ads on the side. He explains:

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 composition of the ads with the substance of text on the the pages, in my case, text about documentaries. The ads I see at that moment of writing are mostly about apartment rentals, but they change each moment one opens the book. The way Adobe/Yahoo “knows” about the composition of the PDF is not by crawling the web, but by the author (me in that case) submitting the PDF to their machine the first moment, which thereupon stamps it with a registration cipher, so it can remember what’s in it when someone far away opens it on their machine.

Like Google, no money flows unless someone clicks on them. whether a reader of the True Films PDF books clicks on an ad, the advertiser pays Yahoo, who in turns gives me some small percent, around 5 cents (I think).

But considering the PDF file must reach out from your computer to the Adobe server to get the

ads, an action that some readers may not approve, seeing the ads is an opt-in default. You have to agree to see the ads before any will show up. You will additionally need the latest version of Acrobat Reader (8) to see them. whether you use an older version no ads will show up, and you’ll see only the free book. Since the ads are adjacent to the book, whether you see ads or not will not affect the design of the book itself.

I’m delighted that he’s exploring new models, but I doubt that one will assemble much money. First, Yahoo’s contextual matching stinks, or something’s gone wrong with it that instance, since the ads were all for apartments when I looked. Even whether they did get the context right, five cents a visit isn’t much when you think that only one in a hundred readers will go on an ad, and that these days most folks don’t have Acrobat 8 yet and won’t even see the ads in the first place. But money wasn’t why Kevin wrote the book, and I suspect he’s more interested in the experiment than the revenues.

As for the book itself, it’s a delight and an fundamental accompaniment to a Netflix subscription. The only improvement I’d like to see is a table of contents. Both website and book are a bit hard to navigate, unless you’re looking for the serendipity of a scroll from top to bottom. whether you love documentaries, or just want to dip your toe into them guided by an expert, start here.