I'm new to October, so I hope somebody could offer me a bit of advice. I'm want to write a website for a community website which needs a book database as the main feature. Also the ability to have posts & articles by admins, and leaving comments by users, but these are separate problems.

Should I install an eCommerce plugin and work around it, or write it up myself as a plugin? The book database needs not only the main table with books data, but also separate ones for authors, publishers, series, etc. All available as searchable and sortable data for front-end users. Overall, seems like reinventing the wheel. An eEcommerce would probably already have a lot of these straight out of the box, but along with commercial features (cart, calculating price, checking stock, etc) I don't need at all.

I'm assuming there's no plugin for I need to accomplish here, so could you let me know which of the eCommerce plugins is the most modular in nature, or the easiest to strip back to bare essentials?