DocBook has served me very well. For my books I put together an automated publishing workflow that starts with DocBook and produces output for both print and digital (in my case, PDF, EPUB, and HTML). For context, I wrote and published two books (4 editions) with more than a 1,000 pages combined. My goal was always continuous writing and publishing where everything is fully automated.<p>Conceptually, XML is an excellent choice for this sort of thing. If you want to produce a good quality book, you need many features and markup that can support them. For a technically minded person, being able to programmatically inspect and modify the manuscript is awesome.<p>Unfortunately, the tooling, although very capable and very well documented (via Bob's free book <a href="http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/" rel="nofollow">http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/</a>), is very difficult to use unless you're an XML expert already. XSLT really isn't a good choice for this sort of thing. That's what I had to use because CSS-styling wasn't mature enough. These days I'd start with CSS instead of XSLT.<p>Crucially, I would use a commercial FO processor. I spent a lot of time with Apache FOP and, even though it's a great tool, it lacked a number of features that one needed for a professional use. (It may have improved by now, my experience is from a decade ago.) I eventually purchased a licence for Antenna Formatter, <a href="https://www.antennahouse.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.antennahouse.com/</a>, which has saved me so much time.<p>You're not meant to write XML by hand, but there aren't that many great editors out there. I use OxygenXML, which is all right. It's expensive. The best thing about OxygenXML is that it supports change tracking. My copyeditor also uses OxygenXML and we have a great workflow that would be impossible to implement in any other way. For me this is the killer feature. A good copyeditor will make thousands of edits to your manuscript. Having an easy way to handle those, respond, and communicate... is key.<p>There are some other interesting tools out there, for example DocBook Compare, which we use to show exactly what changed between two editions. I have some screenshots of what that looks like in this blog post: <a href="https://blog.ivanristic.com/2022/02/bulletproof-tls-and-pki-is-out.html" rel="nofollow">https://blog.ivanristic.com/2022/02/bulletproof-tls-and-pki-...</a><p>To sum up: Do use DocBook. Use OxygenXML to write your books and collaborate with your coauthors and editors. Use Antenna Formatter and CSS for styling. It's going to cost you about $2,000 in software licences, but it's worth it and it will pay back loads in time saved. I understand that no one will spend this much money for a hobby, but for any sort of professional activity, it's a no-brainer.