I ran into this same problem recently: while looking for a legitimate and very specific car book on Amazon, all of the top hits were strange 3rd party offers to sell the book at ridiculous markup, over $200 for a $30 book. At the time I thought the book was just out of print and hard to find. (I eventually found it, it was in print and for sale at normal price from the publisher.). After reading this article I now suspect it was one of these scammer bots. I think this poses a real societal cost: after seeing the inflated prices I very nearly gave up on the idea of buying the book at all, which would have deprived the book author of a sale and would have deprived me of what proved to be a valuable reference book.
