From the article:

If you look a few years back, however, you find a very different landscape. In the internet of the early 2010s, lots of people were excited about making money with trash ebooks and trash audiobooks, but they weren’t yet all trying to scam one another on top of their eventual readers.

[Old]Newsflash: Yeah, they were.

And author copies don't have that annoying "proof" line through the cover. I'd just order author copies at their discount price.

Here's a link to a preview to show you what it looks like without having to visit my site. https://a.co/4dD91h2

Note that the link opens a much larger view than the preview uses normally. On a website, the preview starts with a cover view and controls under it (buy, share, preview). Preview opens a smaller version of what you see from this link. (Default size is 336 × 550, so not quite so overwhelming.) Users can also select full screen if they want.

Some time ago, Amazon provided code that allowed a book preview to be embedded in a website. It was sort of like the old Look Inside, but having it on your own site could be handy. It included a buy link and supported affiliate codes.

Amazon did away with it. I found a Gutenberg block that performed similarly in Wordpress, but that now seems to be functioning erratically.

Anyway, if you look at one of your product pages, you'll notice a share icon just to the right of your title. It has options for email, Pinterest, Facebook, and X, with the embed code just below that, followed by a link.

The embed code creates an iframe that allows a very nice preview of the book. It's actually better than the current "read sample"  routine on the product page, which quite often fails, at least in my experience.

When I get my site updated with those, I'll post a link so that you can take a look and see if such a feature would work for you.

Amazon seems to have changed the Proof system.

Used to be you made a change to a paperback, and you could get another proof.

Now, the moment the book goes live, you can no longer get a proof, no matter what you do to it.

And as happened to me, it took so long for Amazon to action my requests for 2 proofs, that the books went live first, and so the proofs were simply cancelled without informing me of anything.

Much to my surprise, the author copy was the same price as the proof.

Not sure why they bother with proofs now at all. I'll just get author copies in future I think.