It's a, well scam is overly harsh but kinda like that. I looked up
VDM Publishing. Quote from their site: "The main activity of VDM Publishing House Ltd. is to acquire scientific manuscripts (diploma and master theses, dissertations and postdoctoral theses) of academic authors worldwide written mainly in English and German."
In other words, they're really tiny, really small time, and focus on printing things that have very very limited public interest. If I had to guess, someone thought 'Hey, if I cut and paste wikipedia into a book & sell it for $100, I only need to sell 5 copies to cover my christmas shopping budget!' Then they went out and looked for published used to dealing with small limited run printings.
Also of note, B&N (and Amazon too) have a program where you can, basically, be a self published author. Put your piece of fanfiction crap on B&N, charge a buck or two for an ebook of it, split the profit with B&N. While this book isn't under that program (it's ebooks only), that should at least tell you that just because you see something on B&N does not mean it's big time...