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Lots of books on Amazon are now printed on demand. In theory a smart and possibly environmentally friendly practice.

But you end up with smudgy pages from a bad printer, pages missing, and a book binding not lasting more than a day.

I find it especially galling when for a document title search, I’ll see public domain reports (NASA NTRS PDFs for instance) ranking higher in Google results for buying a print on demand copy via Amazon at significantly inflated prices, or honestly just what is plain disgustingly greedy, the many charlatans selling them as kindle ebooks, sometimes as multiple skus with different prices, trying to profit from people that don’t know any better.

This sounds more like you are getting counterfeit books, not print-on-demand.

It’s a real thing [1] - although you might think they were counterfeits on arrival if you weren’t aware of this service

[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Amazon-Print-on-Demand-Guide/b?ie=U...

Yes, it sounds like it. Which says something about the quality of Amazon's product, heh.

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