Creating a good looking book cover proved harder than I expected. I wanted to create a cover looking similar to the original cover of the Free Culture book we are translating to Norwegian, and I wanted it in vector format for high resolution printing. But my inkscape knowledge were not nearly good enough to pull that off.
But thanks to the great inkscape community, I was able to wrap up the cover yesterday evening. I asked on the #inkscape IRC channel on Freenode for help and clues, and Marc Jeanmougin (Mc-) volunteered to try to recreate it based on the PDF of the cover from the HTML version. Not only did he create a SVG document with the original and his vector version side by side, he even provided an instruction video explaining how he did it. But the instruction video is not easy to follow for an untrained inkscape user. The video is a recording on how he did it, and he is obviously very experienced as the menu selections are very quick and he mentioned on IRC that he did use some keyboard shortcuts that can't be seen on the video, but it give a good idea about the inkscape operations to use to create the stripes with the embossed copyright sign in the center.
I took his SVG file, copied the vector image and re-sized it to fit on the cover I was drawing. I am happy with the end result, and the current english version look like this:
I am not quite sure about the text on the back, but guess it will do. I picked three quotes from the official site for the book, and hope it will work to trigger the interest of potential readers. The Norwegian cover will look the same, but with the texts and bar code replaced with the Norwegian version.
The book is very close to being ready for publication, and I expect to upload the final draft to Lulu in the next few days and order a final proof reading copy to verify that everything look like it should before allowing everyone to order their own copy of Free Culture, in English or Norwegian Bokmål. I'm waiting to give the the productive proof readers a chance to complete their work.