A few years back when there was a huge demand for Kindle books with little competition and no restrictions put on sites by Amazon; if you had the right kind of book it was possible to put it up on a ‘free day’ with no promotion and get thousands of downloads. At the time there were no ‘verified purchase‘ labels and no checks so lots of people were buying Fiverr ads that gave them 2-3 reviews for $5. This gave readers the impression that these books were well worth buying. The Kindle devices had limited display features so the quality of the book formatting didn’t matter as much as it does today. People had to download a sample to get a proper look at the book so in the case of a ‘free’ book, it was easier just downloading the whole thing than the possibility of virtually downloading it twice.