One recalls

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/09/17/3014462.htm

which may be pertinent. The fundamental truth is still the Tim O'Reily aphorism that the main enemy of most authors isn't piracy but obscurity. There's some sense in which this is a form of freemium pricing -- use a lower-quality (in this case, crappy scanned) version to drive engagement, then use engagement to drive sales of the good, pay version.

There's a decent chance that the actual publishers get this -- near as I can tell, the real problems with understanding this idea come from the top of the multinational media companies that own the publishers.