The excellent trend watching site PSFK points out that Penguin books in the UK is now leaving some of it’s book covers blank so that people can create their own. This is an interesting extension of crowd sourcing, and has parallels with the Japanese trend for unique book covers I wrote about previously.

It also is a perfect example of type of thing that this HBS article refers to :

For user innovation to be a force, the cost of creating a new design must be within the reach of a single user, whose reward is solely the improvement of his or her own experience.

Have a look at the gallery that Penguin has created so that people can upload their own cover art. I’ve copied an example below :