I'll give an example of the difficulties. I usually do this for more 'literary classic' type of books where added scholarly content may be valuable, but I was recently looking at 'The Mysterious Affair at Styles'. I know there is a version here but wanted to see my options on Kindle.
Here are the results of a simple search by title- 81 versions! And I think most if not all of the first page are by those fake publishers trying to make a quick buck. So I sorted it differently.
Here are the results of sorting it by price highest to lowest. First page includes lots of Audible editions and other random junk including books that aren't this one, bundles I don't want and fake publishers trying to make a quick buck with pricier editions. So I decide to try by different publishers.
After trying over ten, most don't have any results. The ones that do include
Random House/Modern Library and
HarperCollins. Now I'm getting somewhere, but what if I'm somehow missing a version? So back to the longer list to check each one out, which entails having to go into each result that seems plausible as professionally done to look at the publisher and/or preview the ebook.
Here's the kicker. Both of those I just listed aren't in the initial results! What is going on there? I get 81 results for 'mysterious affair at styles' but it somehow omits the two that are actually nicer editions by a bigger publisher. Which makes me even more confused by and distrustful of all the results.
So that's a case study of my trials and tribulations, heh.