An Internet Biz Selling an E-book

I ran across a business today, I have some mixed feelings towards this kind of stuff because it just seems so shady to me:

"My business is for sale, website earned over $1,500 a month. Email me if interested and I'll send you info. Then you can make me an offer. Best off takes it. That's it. I emailed him and am awaiting reply."

That was all it said. So curiosity got to me and I emailed him. And this is a version of what I got back:

The business is for sale for $1000 or best offer. This business is easy to run and it can be ran from anywhere you can get an Internet connection! You're going to get the exact same sales page website I use to generate a decent income online. You're also going to get the very same marketing methods I used to drive tons of free traffic to my website.
See revenue made in the past 2 months from this website. (the revenue was just over $1000 in July and just over $1600 in August. You could see each day how much, if anything, was made and how many items sold)
The cost of running this business is only hosting, $4.95 a month. That's it, there is not a single other cost in owning this business. No merchant fee's or anything because it uses Paypal. I marketed my website by email. What I would do is simply send broadcast emails saying learn to get "free grant money" and say in the email reply if you wish to receive more information. Then when someone would reply wanting more information that's when I would forward them the URL of my website. That's it and it's simple. I used a email spider software to generate all the email addresses for me to market to and I used free yahoo, gmail and hotmail account to send the emails. Only the buyer will get the name of that software along of a free copy of it. I am selling the business because I am going to stay focused on 1 or 2 websites, not 3 or 4 like I have been. So I'm selling off this one. I'm not getting out of this industry. I'll still continue to market online, just not this website. The e-book is delivered to the customer immediately after payment. The e-book is digital and there is never any inventory or stock to keep. The only real work involved in this business is sending emails. If you research this domain you will see it was just recently purchased. Understand, I am selling you the original website sales page I used, not the original domain. I have owned that domain for years and used it on many websites, therefore I will not included it in this sale. The domain has absolutely no effect on how much the website makes, it all comes down to how you marketed it.
Here is what you get.
Domain & Website
Email Spider Software: (this is the software used to gather the emails.)
30 day support
Business Start up Plan: Covers everything from A-Z about running the business and website. You will learn everything from how to market your new website by use of email like I did. I'll even show you the same Broadcast Emails I used for marketing this site. You'll get it all in this Business Plan.

I spent around 2-3 hours a day marketing this site, so about 10-15 hours a week. I have legal rights to be selling this e-book. (He then showed me the license to the e-book that he has). Yes, if you bought this business you also would have legal rights to be selling it.

Alrighty then. So after getting all the info I wanted through a series of emails back and forth I feel like I know enough about it and that it isn't just some scam. This site does make money, but it's no AdSense site where you just site there and people come and go and you get a check. No, you have to work to bring in the money, and not that much of it. 10 to 15 hours of work a week is a lot of time to just make a hopeful $1000 or more. At the same time, for a college student or a stay at home mom this would be wonderful! You can work around your schedule and still have money at the end of the month to pay bills with. And it sounds like pretty easy work too.
If I were to get this business I would only run it by myself for the first month or so just to get a feel for it and work out any kinks till it's a fine tuned money making machine. Then I would hire out virtual assistants to do all my work for me so I just sit back and work just one hour a week instead of 10-15.
Here it is in more detail. You can get a VA (virtual assistant) for $4/hr to $25+/hr. The pricier ones are equivalent to hiring someone with a PhD while the $4 ones are just basic. Luckily, for this business all you need is basic! They just need to send emails! So hire 2 VA's for 2 hours each day with a set of very detailed instructions as to what to do. Then they will be doing all your work for about $480 A MONTH! That's it. You now just have to sit and once a week for one hour get on the computer, have Paypal transfer your balance to your bank, and pay your VA's fees, and make sure all is going well and edit any to do's for your VA's. Done. Now the money you are making isn't much. But you now have two people so you should hopefully double your income to a minimum of $2000 a month minus your VA's fees of about $500 and you get your $1500 a month. Not too shabby Scooby-Doo.