It's not a scam. It's a site for just reading books online. I don't see them saying on the page titles that you can download anything. There are ad buttons on almost every site, and where the advertiser leads is the responsibility of the ad network, and it all depends on your attentiveness as well. To maintain these sites, the owners pay for hosting, and it seems to me that it is not cheap.
I have been using this site for 5 years, and in the Internet Archive, it has existed much longer. I understand authors who are not happy with the fact that their works are posted on the site, but I can assure you that in all 5 years, I have not read a single book in its entirety. Reading books online through a screen is simply impossible. Such sites are used just to see if you like the book or not, whether you should buy it or not. Another case is when you have read a book before but just want to remind yourself of it by reading a few pages. If you like the book, you go to the store and buy it. But the author wants someone to just buy the book with no way to return it if the reader didn't like it - and you can't return the book if you didn't like it, so who's the scammer? :) I look for new books, and if I like the plot, I buy the paper version. So, I treat this site with gratitude, and it's a great previewer for me.
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