Plot twist: the publisher is selling the counterfeits too. Why sell one good book when you can sell one bad one through Amazon and _then_ one good one directly

Plot twist: the publisher is selling the counterfeits too. Why sell one good book when you can sell one bad one through Amazon and _then_ one good one directly from your site? Ok, probably not, but if we're talking about the dystopian end state of a system where the middlemen have gotten out of control then maybe we should look out for things like that. In _Anathem_ (a sci-fi novel) Stephenson describes a future where for every authentic version of a document on the net there are millions of fake ones--bogons, they call them. The history of how the bogons (and the defence system that successfully ignores them most of the time) is somewhat left to the imagination, but I imagined it like this: - Content creators set up special channels where they can get paid for access to the content. - Parasites infiltrate the channels and resell access the content, undercutting the Creators. - The Creators ban the Parasites from the channels, so they can't make copies of the content. - The Parasites re-infiltrate without much delay. - The Creators stop banning the Parasites, and instead--after identifying them--serve them slightly degraded content, so rather than having to compete with themselves, the Creators now compete with a slightly shittier version of themselves. They hope the Parasites don't notice the content degradation. - The Parasites notice the degradation and get new identities, and continue reselling the original content. - There arms race between these parties produces better and better fakes, to the point where there's so much fake news (or whatever content) that the only way to verify its authenticity is to re-do the journalism yourself to see what you find. In my version, the Creators win by establishing an economy of trust (part PGP, part cryptocurrency) where being a parasite is less profitable than either making good content or helping distribute good content (in a way that benefits the creator and gives the consumer reason to believe that they're not being lied to). I'm not sure if I think this will actually happen, but if it does then we'll have to go through the pre-web-of-trust darkness (where the light of truth is occluded by bogons) before things are reliably authentic again.