Are authors running out of book titles?

People first started to notice last year when Kate Atkinson's Life After Life coincided in the US with Jill McCorkle's Life After Life, which had been published just six days earlier. Since then examples of novels with the same name have kept on cropping up. There is, for instance the story of Canadian writer Erica Schultz, who had no idea when she brought out Joyland in 2005 that Stephen King would find that title irresistible eight years later. This resulted in King fans buying Schultz's ebook in error, initially irritating her, but she's "not so upset any more" after receiving "a big royalty cheque for those mistaken books".

Could authors and publishers be starting to run out of titles? It can look that way when you come across examples such as Bret Anthony Johnston's Remember Me Like This (just out, and this week's Book of the Week on Radio 4) and Sabine Durrant's Remember Me This Way (out in mid-July), from divisions of the same publisher yet both granted their unaccountable wish to reference the same 1970s Gary Glitter single.

While there's no copyright in titles – as Muriel Spark ruefully noted on learning that Peter O'Toole had chosen to call his memoirs Loitering with Intent, like her 1981 novel – there's ever more scope for confusion; not least because Amazon not only keeps more books alive but also ensures that title kinship is immediately visible: books with similar names will be on the same Amazon page.

A few clicks, for example, suggest that with her next novel, The Blondes, Schultz could face the reverse experience, becoming someone whose title echoes earlier ones: among its siblings will be Joyce Carol Oates's Blonde, Bernadine Evaristo's Blonde Roots and Paula Yates's Blondes. Unless novelists switch en masse to the imitator-proof JK Rowling approach (you don't find many twins of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban), that's increasingly liable to happen.