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Adobe And Yahoo Partner End Scammy Ebook Deals

Adobe and Yahoo are partnering to enable advertising and PDF documents.  This partnership can be extremely significant if you from the perspective that their efforts could in the use of e-books as scams attract people into spending money on useless information.

Today many websites and companies attract visitors to come into the site looking for information.  They then were to attempt to sell an e-book to those visitors, the visitors can’t know if the book is any good or not and often times and the purchasing useless information is readily available for free on the Internet.

On the flipside, publishers are struggling to find ways to get fair value for the work and knowledge that they provide online.  An e-book is one way that they can sell their knowledge for fair value.  The problem is that too many people abuse the same e-books and the same marketing principle essentially self useless information or even stolen content.

Historically, publishers and sold as information in an e-book form, because once the PDF is released, it can be thoroughly spread through e-mail and downloads.  Once that happens, the publisher will never see another dime from their work. 

The Adobe Yahoo! Solution - Can Change this Market Significantly

Yahoo and Adobe have decided to work together to provide PDF documents that will run advertising within those PDF documents.  This will enable publishers to receive advertising revenue through their virally circulated PDF documents.  That is a significant advancement and could decrease publishers needs to sell those same PDF documents upfront.

Valid publishers with good contents won’t need to sell their documents if they can earn advertising revenues through viral distribution.  This could then thin the herd of the number of publishers that actually sell e-books, and that will decrease the consumers desire to purchase e-books as the remaining e-books and the market will be even more likely to be scamming material not worth buying.

Flip Side - More Advertising

there is a flip side to this solution.  People that get a good deal of information from PDFs will now be exposed to even more advertising within those PDF documents.  It will take publishers some time to learn how to problems advertising and their PDF documents with their content and do so in a way that does not look or feel Spammy.

In general however I think the merits of eliminating the number of fraudulent PDF e-books on the market will benefit consumers more than the increase in advertising that they will be exposed to.

When Will PDF Advertising Be Available?

This new service is not available to publishers yet, it will be going through a beta test through a small select group of publishers initially.  That beta test will ill probably roll into an even greater or larger beta test after that, and then eventually it might be opened up to even more publishers.

Yahoo and Adobe have to learn how to work this into an automated process, and they have to figure out a way to ensure that these documents are secure and do not open up readers to computer attacks.

How Does the Adobe Yahoo PDF Advertising Solution Work

1. A publisher creates a PDF Document
2. The Publisher uploads the document to Adobe
1. This requires a Yahoo Publisher account
2. This also requires an Adobe Account
3. Adobe then works to place Yahoo Publisher advertising (contextual PPC advertising) in a sidebar area on the PDF document.
1. So if you wrote a pdf document about say, the marketing purposes of offering promotional pens at a trade show, ads related to that subject may appear
2. If you sell such pens, you would not want your competitors advertising on your PDF
3. If you are a consultant that helps people figure out how to do this, you might want the advertising there to compensate for the knowledge you have provided
4. Adobe then sends the PDF back or sends a notification for the download of the updated document
5. The publisher can then distribute the PDF document to readers
6. Readers can hide the advertising if they choose
7. Readers can also prevent the PDF document from accessing the internet

Yahoo Approaches a Problem with a Solution, Google Approaches a Problem with an Attack

As a side note, I think it’s illustrative to take a look at Yahoo’s response to the problem of e-books that scamp the people that buy them.  There’s definitely a market in e-books and PDF documents in general.  Yahoo chose not to penalize people that sell these scamming e-books, but instead they chose to create a solution that provides an incentive for the marketplace to use better practices.  They have opted to give a reward for doing things better as opposed to penalizing people that do things in a way that is detrimental towards readers.

Google on the other hand has recently chosen to attack publishers when they engage in publishing behavior that Google doesn’t like, especially when that behavior threatens Google’s monopoly.  Google could have chosen to offer up a better solution instead of attacking publishers, but chose to attack first and protect their monopoly.

I suspect that Adobe chose to partner with Yahoo as opposed to Google, because Gould takes a monopolistic approach to business as opposed taking approaches that provide solutions to consumers. 

Source - Adobe And Yahoo Partner To Put Ads In PDFs