It seems antithetical to the spirit of releasing a book about Tor and "future of privacy", and to then not only watermark each PDF, but to not explicitly state that this is the case, let alone explain why.
I initially read this as there being tracking pixels in the PDF. I'm hate that I have to ask this, but are tracking pixels a thing in the PDF format? (Execluding embedded js, ofc)
Can PDFs be crafted such that they would ping remote servers when opened in most PDF viewers?
I agree it seems a bit scummy, yet likely unavoidable for the author due to the way MIT Press distributes things.
It's thankfully licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0, which allows for converting the content to other formats (given attribution and non-commercial use, same license, etc etc) [0]. I'd reckon that making a de-fingerprinted version and redistributing it as an epub, md, or pdf again would be allowed, then.
As for getting a clean copy to work from, using Tor would be quite fitting. I plan to convert the version I downloaded to epub for ereader use, maybe downloading it a couple times over different routes and combining to see if that has any impact on the fingerprinting. I'll comment with a download if I get to that and feel it's of a quality worth sharing.
Why are the PDFs individually watermarked?
It seems antithetical to the spirit of releasing a book about Tor and "future of privacy", and to then not only watermark each PDF, but to not explicitly state that this is the case, let alone explain why.