There is quite a limited audience for this book. It is clearly aimed at general pharmaceutical executives and pharmacists. It's probably also worth reading if you run a Ministry of Health for a government. One of the points made early on in the book is that pharmaceutical counterfeiting happens everywhere (even in the UK, an island with a very tightly controlled pharmaceutical supply chain). That having been said, I would expect that pharma/pharmacist/consumer retail pharmacy chains who have international business are the target market for this book.
Luckily, the target market will also find it highly readable, for the most part. Before I get into why, that means that if you're an interested layperson who wants to know more about any of the following:
1, why counterfeiting is such a problem
2, how it can be detected
3, how it can be prevented
then you should not be scared off by the apparently academic nature of this book. It is engaging enough to sit down and read through.
However, to use this book most effectively you'll pretty much have to read through it rather than treat it as an occasional reference. There's lots of three-letter abbreviations/acronyms peppered throughout the text. Although these are well-defined initially AND in the excellent glossary at the back of the book, they will still prevent this book from being something you can dip into for a quick answer, unless you know the material so well that the book will no longer really be useful anyway.
The first portion of the book explains why counterfeiting is such a big issue, highlighting the fascinating and highly current example of anti-malarials. There was a bubble and blip in the market for the latest treatments, which played havoc with the economics for legitimate pharmaceutical manufacturers, and ultimately created a situation that endangered human lives AND threatens the long-term use of our most effective anti-malarial drugs. The next quarter of the book is a practical catalog of analytical methods for detecting counterfeit bulk material, finished product, and packaging. The third section investigates how product can be tracked, including future expected advances. The last portion of the book is a list of useful resources, references, and the excellent glossary.
In summary, it is useful to have the problem and potential non-proprietary solutions laid out so clearly in one place. I found myself wishing for a little more detail in terms of logistics (how long do certain detection methods take, how much do they cost, what are the trade-offs I should be considering?) fairly often, but that would come at the cost of readability. The book is current right up to the end of 2010. Editing, etc, obviously took some time, but the results were worth it.
If you need to know how insidious the problem is, and how to think about wrapping your head around it, this book is the primer you've been looking for. If you're already immersed in the problem of counterfeit pharmaceuticals and need more than a very solid introduction, you should probably get the book anyway to ensure you haven't missed anything, but you'll probably need something more detailed/even more practical.