Amazon has a terrible counterfeiting problem, including for books. It's possible that a third-party seller made a counterfeit, low-quality print of the book and set a lower price that meant they got chosen for the “buy button” by the Amazon algorithm (this has happened to many books). Since the reviews don't distinguish between sellers, you get this problem.
If you buy from a legitimate book store, perhaps this can be avoided?
No, the actual publisher (Elsevier) printed a batch of terrible quality books. This led to our ending our relationship with them. We are in the midst of finding a new publisher for the 4th edition; not repeating that disaster is of great importance to us...
If you buy from a legitimate book store, perhaps this can be avoided?