LMNOP, catching title. I dont do gentle because the real world isnt'. Thats for school.

Out of all three, Im leaning towards the first one. But the line spacing is way too tight, completely affects the readability. Im not too crazy about the MARK DUNN-baseline effect you having going on. I would drop the black bar and experiment with the big open wall you have in the background. That is a dream pallete to work on. Use it. Why did you chose pixelation? To me, it doesnt reflect the books theme.

Compositionally, you have split the page into four zones. Was this on purpose? Work on hierarchy. We read from Left to Right. So placing the tiltle in the far right is not a good idea. And drop one of the authors name. You have it listed twice.

I like the non-geometric type selections (since the background is geometric.)

> I dont do gentle because the real world isnt’. Thats for school.

Is that helpful or harmful for the students ?

Thanks Prakash - some great points which I hadn't noticed.

To me, pixelation is a perfect concept to experiment with. The book is about - among other things - the degradation of language. Pixelation was one of the ideas that jumped out at me most having brainstormed degraded type and purposefully obscured type.

I don't mean to sound ungrateful here or anything, but you do realise this is not just the front cover, right? This is the entire jacket - this explains why the author's name is replicated (once for the cover and once for the spine) and why the title of the book might appear so drastically placed on the right hand side. Apologies if I'm way out here!

The barcode has to be a certain size, you should make sure you don't go below the legal minimum and most publishers will insist that their logo remains on the spine. You might also have to set the spine in a more 'conventional' typeface, probably all uppercase.
These things might let down the design but since they are real-world important you should probably keep them.
I have no real problem with the composition of the type on the back, although it could have more leading and have a narrower measure; you could also look at turning over some of the words to make the right margin smoother and kerning out the space between the italic P and remain, version 2 doesn't look centred on the width and I would outdent the last line by the width of the ellipsis, (btw two points "correspondence" and en-dash (option+hyphen) should replace the hyphen).
As for the treatments the letraset versions seem to be masking the title of the book with the extra l's and tilde n's.
Tim

The trick about the barcode is the widths of the lines. I have found i can vertically crop them a bit and not get into trouble. But scaling is a no-no.