[arocks]

Thank you so much for writing this. It is useful not just for Emacs users but to anyone who prefers writing their book in a text-based markup rather than Microsoft Word. It also explains how to collaborate with someone who uses Word exclusively.

Unfortunately, every tool has a quirk and we eventually need to settle on a workflow that somehow works, even though everything might be open source as you have described in the case of Pandoc. But I believe Emacs is the best authoring tool for books due to its versatility.

[mickeyp]

Pandoc's great. It has many great advantages and I would not hesitate to recommend it, but when you commit to a workflow early (rst in my case) rewriting or converting it mid-way through is a major hassle, one I'd rather like to avoid.

Still, rst/Markdown/Docbook is better than MS Word for techies.