Commercial publishers, though not as blatant about it, are nearly as bad in their own way. A financially successful book is guaranteed to spawn hordes of imitations from "respectable" publishing houses.

I was in a physical Barnes & Noble store not long ago and noted that they now have an entire section labeled "Teen Paranormal Romance".

That's mixing things up. Imitation isn't the problem here: clones happen of all successful products, and that's a good thing.

The problem is fraud. These titles and authors (and sometimes cover art) are deliberately similar to existing products and appear designed to catch sales from people who aren't paying attention. That's not the same thing at all.

I dunno. While I'm not a connoisseur of that genre, some of the imitations do seem to be deliberately designed to skirt just this side of the line that would get them sued and/or indicted.

"Yeah, we'll call ours...Moonlight, and we'll make the guy a zombie, no a mummy!, not a vampire..."

Clearly the "books" in the referenced article are way over the line, wherever it is. That's why I said "not quite as blatant". However, I don't think the position of that line is quite as firm as you're suggesting.

I still think you're confused. Making a Twilight knockoff about mummies isn't going to get you sued or indicted. The content, in fact, really doesn't matter. The point is are you deliberately trying to confuse buyers who want Twilight into buying your book instead by mistake?

That's just not a feasible attack vector with brick & mortar stores, where you can't draw eyeballs without paying for very expensive off-shelf displays. But on Amazon, you can game the search results to put up a page that looks to an uninformed buyer like the genuine product. That's fraud, or nearly so, and it's absolutely not what the me-too publishing world does.

I've seen "fake O'Reilly" paper books from other publishers that use cover designs very similar to real O'Reilly books.

They were quite obviously intended to deceive an unsuspecting buyer into thinking the book was an O'Reilly product.

I don't think there is any debate that there is value to be added by curation. The conversation gets confused when people talk about 'publishing houses' like they exist today, and a curation entity which will replace them in the future.

A great example is the Apple 'AppStore' versus the Android 'Marketplace' (now please if you are a huge fan, don't worry, not disparaging either!). The market dynamics of the AppStore which is highly curated by Apple and the MarketPlace (nee Google Play) which is only loosely curated by Google create two sets of orthogonal problems. In the AppStore people complain that opaque and arbitrary rules prevent them from being made available, in the Marketplace people complain that lax supervision and accountability allows crap and malware to flourish.

Generally the market response to this sort of problem is an an open market and an evaluation agency. The agency applies a set of evaluations to the product and then 'approves' it (allowing the use of trademarks and trade dress associated with said approval), it is accompanied by an outreach program which educates consumers. The business is monetized by reviews, affiliate marketing, and advertising.

Perhaps the most directly applicable example in the 21st century is 'AngiesList' which started, if you can believe Angie, as a list of places she knew and approved of. Its a trivial business to start, the leverage is in the ubiquity. So a long haul (time) of providing the list of approved/reviewed applications, the trade dress, and of course enforcing it when others try to insinuate approval when they don't have it.

If this is a significant problem in the market, then it also an opening for a site which filters out the copy-cats and tries to make money on affiliate links to various stores.

Adam Roberts has a few parody books (eg "The Soddit"). He also has some good science fiction books. I particularly enjoyed Salt, and New Model Army.