I wonder if having a swarm of people buy these items, then returning them since they clearly don't match the expected result from the description, would hurt the sellers enough so they would stop doing this sort of scam.

Unfortunately I doubt it. If they are just printing on-demand low-quality books it seems they’d not be badly hurt as their variable costs are cheap paper and cheap ink.

If you could find a book that broke their machine, sort of a Legends of Stuxnet, then you’d get somewhere.

Or if you figured out their business and determined if they sold so many they placed a bulk order for a printing, then place that many orders, they place the bulk order, you stop buying, and then do the mass return.

yeah I saw that too. They take the books from archive.org, it’s public domains books.

It’s essentially legal, and I think it’s not that scammy honestly. People want these books on paper, nobody prints them anymore or has the texts.

edit: I also saw some people selling the OCR from these books, which is far worse. You need to guess the original, especially if it has some latin/german inside English.

I honestly think it would be fine if they were a bit more clear about what you're buying. As it is, you're typically getting nearly no information beyond the title and the publisher.

Making available rare out of print books is a noble goal.