The truth is out – or at least the "unauthorised autobiography". Opening with a dramatic scene in the back of a police van with "press photographers … scrabbling around the windows like crabs in a bucket", and ending in a Norfolk house that "was soon to become … [a] prison for the foreseeable future", the promised account of the "global struggle to force a new relationship between the people and their governments" hits bookshops today, after a cloak-and-dagger operation to prevent its subject from halting its publication.

But whose book is it? The subject, Julian Assange, disowns it, claiming in a statement on the Wikileaks website that his publisher, Canongate, is "profiteering from an unfinished and erroneous draft" which was never intended for publication, but was handed over "for viewing purposes only". According to the Independent, which has begun serialising the book today, ghostwriter Andrew O'Hagan became "increasingly uncomfortable about the furore", and appears only as an unnamed writer in the publisher's note describing the "more than 50 hours of taped interviews" on which the book is based. Perhaps the real author of the book is head of Canongate Jamie Byng, who splashed out on the Assange autobiography at the end of last year, presumably hoping that the man of the moment would deliver the kind of landslide publishing victory his house pulled off with Barack Obama.

But now, Canongate finds itself accused by Assange himself of "screwing people over to make a buck": he claims that the published version was in fact a draft, a "work in progress" and that he had promised to provide a new version of the book by the end of this year. According to Canongate the contract "still stands", since Assange had "already signed his advance over to his lawyers to settle his legal bills" before informing them he wanted to cancel the deal. They have "decided to honour it – and to publish" – but it's difficult to see where honour comes into this decision.

Canongate publishing director Nick Davies denies Assange's advance was the reported £500,000, but tells the Bookseller that the Independent was "left with no other option". Maybe you have sympathy with a small publisher straining under a "financial imperative", but isn't it just wrong to publish something against an author's wishes, even if that author is a little hard to work with? This autumn might have looked pretty bleak fior Canongate, without a book that has already shot to the top of Amazon's list of movers and shakers, but sometimes the hard decision is to do nothing at all.