You'll find one of the essays from the Galactica book
here. If you compare this with, say, Galen Strawson's '
Against Narrativity', you get some sense of the ways in which identity is a problem for philosophers. Although I find the Strawson paper more interesting, I don't think it can be denied that the Galactica paper is 'doing philosophy'.
So it may be that these pop philosophy books are taking real philosophy out into places that ordinary philosophy doesn't usually reach. That seems no bad thing, to me. In France there is a movement to do the same thing, although this movement doesn't work so much through pop figures as through pop places : philosophers hold special evenings in cafés, for example, inviting anyone to come in and join the fray.