Links from offline documents

[lin robinson]

I'm preparing some tutorials that will be sent to buyers by email. They contain a lot of links to websites. Including mine.
You're reading the document on Adobe or whatever, click on the link and it opens in your browser.

My question: what is the value of such links. There is no "home" the link came from online. On the other hand, it made a link. It will show up on site statistics. (As "no referral source" or some such I'm guessing)

But what does this mean to a search engine? Is it viable, invisible, a ghost artifact to be ignored?

[Brian Turner]

I would ensure the PDF is available free online, and try and get other people to steal it and add to their "Free ebook giveaways" to build up extra links.

[bumfluff]

I'd imagine it'd show as a direct request if it came from something like a .pdf document. There's no referring site. I don't see how it would have any effect on search engines, as there's no search engine involvement. As for value, I guess that depends on how your site makes money (ads or product/service) and the document itself.. if the document is about a field related to your work, then the viewer probably already has some interest in what you do.

[lin robinson]

Kind of what I figured, but thanks for the input.