Have you ever wanted to place contextual adverts in your ebooks? Well, that may be an option in your future considering that Adobe and Yahoo! are working on something along those lines right now.

Adobe ADBE and Yahoo YHOO on Thursday plan to launch Ads for Adobe PDF Powered by Yahoo. The optional service for publishers, now in testing, has the potential to offer readers access to more free content, supported by ads.

The service is targeted to publishers ranging from small newsletter writers to large media companies with decades’ worth of archived content stored in the PDF format.

Text-based ads, sold by Yahoo, will appear in a side panel next to the electronic document.

CNN Money

In order to get the PDF file ad enabled, you’d need to put it through a spinner at Adobe’s website and then you’re free to distribute it however you see fit.

Chances are, this could be a good compliment to the free special reports or newsletters that you distribute in PDF format, but it may not be the way to go if you’re releasing a commercial product.

While it could add another revenue stream to your product, it would still be wiser to insert your own affiliate links with your endorsement because the commission is likely to be higher than what you’d be paid for the click. Plus, the click through rate for the ads seems as though it would be quite sketchy. (It’s difficult to speculate without the data.)