Advice on coding a slightly complex catalogue system

Hi All.

I’m fairly new to WordPress, and I’m attempting to build a theme to handle a slightly complicated cataloguing system. I’m hoping someone can suggest the best way to do it.

For example, if the catalogue were to list books, then I would want a page that focused on the main edition of each book. But I would also want to include information about all the other editions of the book (e.g., foreign editions, ebook editions, and so on). So, as well as the main catalogue entry, there could be an unlimited series of additional groups of information relating to the other editions attached to the main edition and displayed on the main edition page.

My first instinct was to do this using a custom taxonomy. I would have the page for the book and then use the custom taxonomy to add the details of the other editions. But the other editions might also need images to go with each of them (in the case of a book, the covers of the other editions in various sizes), and I don’t know of any way of adding images through a custom taxonomy.

My current thought is to use a custom page (or post?) template for the other editions, with only limited fields. Each edition would be created as a subpage/post to the main edition, and then I’d use a query to pull up all the information from these and insert it into the main edition page. My worry is that this might be a bit inefficient and may be a clumsy way of doing it.

Does anyone have any suggestions on the best way that I could carry this task out?

Thanks in advance!