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I spent ten years writing a textbook; during the last two years I was fighting, then recovering from, stage 4 cancer. It was finally published in October 2020, and a pirated copy of the book is already available online, for free. This sucks.
The ebook version of the book that's available commercially is only readable on a proprietary platform, not available as a PDF, and isn't formatted as nicely as the pirated copy.
I asked my publisher if they could send me, THE AUTHOR, a PDF version of the book, and they would only send me a watermarked version because they (understandably) didn't want pirated copies to circulate. AND YET HERE WE ARE.
I genuinely have no idea how this high-quality, watermark-free, not-commercially-available version of my book got on the internet. Was it... an inside job?
I mean, did someone who works at the publisher decide to release this into the wild? Why would someone do that?
To be clear this is definitely NOT a case of someone paying for the ebook and then sharing it with the world, because the ebook is not formatted the same as the pirated version online. AFAIK the *only* people who have access to the PDF are folks who work at the publisher.
