I worked for a publisher for about 10 years as a typesetter and ebook developer. There are a lot of things about the publishing industry that are antiquated, especially for non-technical publishing companies. Unfortunately it's a low margin business.<p>Most authors are only familiar with Microsoft Word, so on the front end you often have to take a messily styled Word document and manually caress it into a structured document that can be used for ebooks and print.<p>For print, a majority of non-technical publishers use Adobe InDesign and/or InCopy. Editors edit manuscripts in InCopy and typesetters style documents for print. PDFs are generally exported and sent to printers via FTP.<p>For ebooks, every publisher seems to have their own bespoke system. You _can_ export books in epub format from InDesign but the process for getting a clean ebook is difficult to say the least since InDesign was primarily designed for print publications. Generally, you end up structuring books for the lowest common denominator of ebook platform (epub, kindle, etc.) unless you are creating something like a children's book or a poetry book where you might do something more custom.<p>Many publishers use ebook distribution platforms where you upload epub, mobi, cover images via FTP. They use an XML standard called ONIX for distributing metadata that's unique to say the least...