Rel Author markup for a Book Product?

[Gloyns]

Hi mozzers,

I'm writing up some recommendations for a rebuild of a large bookstore E-commerce site which includes a section on structured data.

I'm looking through schema markup and specifically the Product, Thing, CreativeWork and Book schemas.

I'm confused however as to whether rel author is applicable/suitable to a book product page?

The author of the page is the website, but the author of the book is the Author.

The author's name within the product will be linked to their Author Profile page on the website which could potentially include a link to their Google+ page (if they have it... probably <0.01% of Authors, but should be enough for Google to connect the dots).

It could work but I don't want to attribute authorship of the page to the book author - I just want to markup the product page to indicate who the author of a book product is.

My concern is also that I want the product image to be displayed in SERPs, not the Author photo. Does anybody have any experience or advice regarding this?

Cheers

Andrew

[edwardrj]

What would be the downside to displaying the author of the book as the author of the page? Does the page contain information not relevant to the book itself?

As far as the product photo rather than the author photo, I've never seen Google display a non-head shot as part of the page's author link in SERPs -- even when originally verified and integrated with a head shot (if someone has a different experience, please chime in because I'm curious).