[Amezarak]

Books are a huge nightmare. Especially older books - search results are completely flooded and dominated by poor-quality fly-by-night print-on-demand publishing "companies" that take bad OCRs or even worse and reprint them. Making matters worse, reviews for different editions (including electronic editions!), publishers, and translations are all conflated!

This makes it impossible to ascertain anything about the quality and nature of the book you are actually buying - you might read ten reviews complaining about the translation, only none of them are actually about the translation you're looking at - you have no way of knowing unless they happen to mention it in the review you're looking at. You might read many reviews about very poor binding - but is it from the publisher you're looking at? No clue!

This isn't even getting onto the counterfeit issue you mention.