I posted on this topic: http://selftaughtjapanese.com/2017/02/13/translation-piracy-goes-with-the-territory/

Looking forward to a new chapter of Japan: A new Age. ^^

And as for the embedded PDFs. Those likely bring about even more problems, if you want to have as many people as possible being able to read it without having to put in some effort. So I can agree with your sentiment. 🙂

While I have used PDFs along with some other techniques, at least one user has complained about readability, and personally I feel it is an awkward experience.

So at this point I am debating whether I just go back to straight posting on my site. I could write a long comment here but I was thinking about writing a post about this topic so maybe will do that instead.

Well there is nothing that can’t get stolen at all. Epub/PDF is no exception to that. You probably can make it difficult, but ultimately it will have some kind of flaw either way. In the worst case one can always OCR it and just fix the result. But then again that would also mean some work for the one doing it.
The translator of Japan: A new age (a very decent novel btw) uses embedded PDF’s for the releases. That seems to work too as his translations aren’t stolen as far as I’ve seen. But I think that option would make it even more difficult for those needing to translate or to copy the stuff somewhere else than the compromise I’m planning (will announce it tomorrow).