We've seen a few examples of children's books that can be personalized with photos of the child who will be reading them, but it wasn't until recently that we learned of one that can be customized to feature a favourite toy instead. Sure enough, French publisher Typlume & Graphine offers a series of books called La Vie de Mon Doudou in which a treasured toy or security blanket is cast as the hero.

Parents or other gift-givers simply upload three photos of their child's security blanket or favourite toy: one head-on, one profile shot and one alternative view. From there, the company stages the "doudou" in various adventures and situations, such as sitting on the back of a cow or riding the Paris metro. Seven story themes are available, including "The day of my security blanket" and "My security blanket protects the planet." Each spiral-bound, hardcover book costs EUR 29.90 and is printed sustainably in France. Typlume & Graphine currently ships to France, Corsica, Belgium and Luxembourg. (Related: Gravanity books for kids — Narrate-your-own storybook videos — Personalized e-stories for kids on Kindle and iPhone.)

Website: www.laviedemondoudou.com
Contact: contact@laviedemondoudou.com

Spotted by: Fadila Merizak

Billed as a 'virtual taste search engine', Aromicon lists thousands of wines categorised by every imaginable detail. Wines can be browsed by region, grape variety or food pairing, as well as searched by keyword. There's also the option to browse according to taste, featuring a huge range of subtleties to satisfy the requirements of the most practiced palette—everything from 'kiwi' and 'butter', to peculiarities like 'animal' and 'blood' (luckily you can opt to exclude those).

Although the site is in German, it's almost navigable by its icons alone—hence the name. And in a visually innovative twist, a short animation graphically displays a wine's unique blend of flavours, showing berries, chocolate, pipes, etc swirling around in a glass. The concept is a spin-off from the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design, and features a vintage revenue model: the site essentially functions as a fully-featured affiliate sales portal linking to several German wine merchants. One to serve up for wine-lovers who don't speak German, or to partner with if you're in the wine business?

Website: www.aromicon.com
Contact: kontakt@aromicon.com

Spotted by: Franziska Luh

We've seen the Wikipedia model applied to car design, a video dictionary and an online publishing platform. The latest? Foodista, an online cooking encyclopedia whose recipes can be edited by anyone.

Launched late last year, Seattle-based Foodista is a collaborative project to build the world's largest, highest-quality cooking encyclopedia. The site says it is the first to organize and cross-link the basic elements of cooking: foods, or the basic ingredients; recipes, or combinations of ingredients; cooking techniques; and kitchen tools. Rather than include hundreds of recipes for the same basic result, however—the way many recipe sites do—Foodista aims instead to perfect a few key recipes through the collaborative editing process. Thousands of high-resolution photos from the Flickr.com Creative Commons currently illustrate the topics on the site—though not the results of specific recipes, as TechCrunch points out—and users can also upload their own photos. Content is fully editable, and a raft of tools aimed at food bloggers include embeddable widgets to forge automated links from Foodista to specific food blogs. Ultimately, Foodista plans to support itself through online advertising.

Will a thousand cooks produce a better recipe, as the site implicitly promises? Or will the collaborative process reduce each of the site's recipes to the most bland, lowest-common-denominator version, as TechCrunch suggests it might? Time will tell. In the meantime, one to watch—or get involved in? (Related: 52 recipe contests to spawn crowdsourced cookbook — Personalized cooking: recipes match cravings — Customized cookbooks stir in online recipes.)

Website: www.foodista.com
Contact: www.foodista.com/contact

Spotted by: Murtaza Ali Patel

Puzzle books are big sellers, but generally not much to look at. Aiming to capture that gap in the market is a series of eyecatching, pocket-sized books. The Pocket Posh line includes about two dozen books, which retail for USD 7.99. Each features 100 puzzles: crosswords, hangman, word searches, logic puzzles and various forms of sodoku.

Floral and geometric designs grace their covers, and the books have rounded corners and elastic band closures that mimic Moleskine notebooks. Developed by The Puzzle Society and published by Andrews McMeel, Pocket Posh is targeting female puzzlers. Proof once again that everything can be upgraded to appeal to design-sensitive consumers. One for other publishers to be inspired by? (Related: Toilet seat covers, upgraded — Chic vomit bags for morning-sick moms.)

Website: www.andrewsmcmeel.com
Contact: www.andrewsmcmeel.com/contact.html

What's better than reading? Having someone read to you. Even better—having the author read to you. When book lovers visit an author's reading, they generally know his or her work. Aiming to introduce readers to authors they aren't yet familiar with, zehnSeiten (German for ten pages) promotes writers through videos that feature them reading ten pages from their latest novel.

Available both online and as an iPhone app, the videos are simple, fixed-camera affairs. No dramatic introductions or filmed scenes, just black and white recordings of authors sitting at a table and reading from their work. By eliminating frills, the focus is on the author and production time and costs are kept to a minimum. Videos range in length from ten to thirty minutes and feature work from a variety of publishers. New recordings are added weekly. zehnSeiten is the brainchild of five friends from Munich—an idea they had over drinks. It's a concept that's easily adaptable to others categories or other countries, at relatively low cost.

Website: www.zehnseiten.de
Contact: info@zehnseiten.de

Spotted by: Franziska Luh

P.S. For those of you who don't speak German, zehnSeiten adds that Tim Parks' and Paul Beatty's videos are in English.