Sorting Authors for book site

Hi folks,

I’m putting together a website for a small book publisher. I figure each book will be a post with the subject or series as categories. This will allow me to easily sort books for our customers to browse.

They need to be able to browse by author as well and am wondering if I should treat authors as users or input their names in custom fields.

Requirements:
? I should be able to click an author’s name and see all the books by that author.
? I should be able to dynamically list authors in subsets (a-c, d-f for instance).
? I should be able to have a BOOK role attached to the author (ie, author, editor, photographer, illustrator).

Advantages of making authors users:
? There’s a convenient dropdown of authors on the edit post page (we would have hundreds)
? There are already functions in WP to sort and display author info. So it could save me quite a bit of coding that I don’t know how to do yet.

Disadvantages:
? The user pages are separated from the edit post area which may cause some confusion to staff members inputting data.
? Each user requires an email address which some of our authors don’t have, or I don’t know.
? Filling out all the required “edit user” fields adds more time to each book entry.
? I would have multiple authors, editors, or photographers attached to each post. It would require a plugin or other coding to allow multiple authors per post.

Customers ultimately need to be able to browse by author, title, subject, or series. I’m sure custom fields could do what I need but think they would be more complex to implement and administer.

Any thoughts on that? Am I missing anything?

thanks