There is a macro for this. You just write ##AUTHORS## somewhere in chapter (output can be customized a bit). List of authors will not be visible in editor but is visible if you go to draft or published version of a chapter.
Actually Tomi if you felt like another commit then more config options on this macro would be good to control the formatting and types of data displayed
When I tried adding ##AUTHORS## to a document I ended up getting a lengthy changelog instead of a list of authors. Also, when I create an EPUB version of the book, various epub readers all determine the Author to be 'The Contributors'.
I was looking at microformats (especially Schema.org) and they cannot handle a book properly. Seemingly a book (http://schema.org/Book) is more like a product you can buy while an article is something that has content you can actually read online.
Seemingly Schema.org can handle authorship, but it cannot understand the concept of online books.
I find that when I unzip the epub the content.opf file lists the author(s) in the following line:
<dc:creator>The Contributors</dc:creator>
Maybe my problem is related to using booki.cc as I don't have sufficient access to my shared hosting provider to add install booktype on my own server, but I would have expected an individual user account to have been sufficient to be listed as author on a book created by that account.
Here is a link to an epub for what I have done so far with this book:
"The Contributors" is hard coded author at the moment. Problem is that all of the books on the Flossmanuals site (where it all started) were written by multiple authors and there was no interface to change specific author. Until now! :) I am working at the moment on this interface for one of the customers and i think it will be integrated at one point into vanilla Booktype.
Actually it would be hard to do something like that so that it would work in every Booktype installation. Or which external services different installations would like to use.
I don't even know yet if the Finnish FLOSS Manuals Booktype needs some external communication channel or not.
I have only been testing Schema.org semantic markup in the authors list and various other parts of Booktype. It just takes forever since you have to wait for Google to crawl and index the site to see if it has any effect. Google.fi doesn't actually support it yet, so it is quite useless on a Finnish site. And it wants dates in a non-localized format, which pretty much makes it unusable on non-English sites.
Apparently many semantic markup formats (like FOAF, which is still offered by Identi.ca) have been abandoned, since you need major search engines to support them for them to be widely adapted. At least Schema.org is supposed to have long-term support by Google, Bing and Yandex, so it would make some sense to use that for things like author information.
(Talking about search engines I really like the open source P2P search engine YaCy, but currently it always crashes on my Linux after a few hours, probably has something to do with Java.)
I don't know about that Dublin Core markup used by the ePub files, never even noticed that the metadata you can edit in the Booktype admin interface is actually used somewhere. Apparently Google doesn't support DC it any more? Which format of metadata would be supported by both search engines and ePub readers?