In order to see what is needed in book writing applications, you need
to look carefully at the desk of someone who is actively writing a
book. You will most likely see piles of paper, often cut up and marked
with pencil, and if you examine those of the papers that are in piles,
you will see that the pagination is all over the place because pages
have been reordered. Read on...
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Member since:LaTeX is not at all prepared for book writers, in fact it is not prepared to be used by any content-creator unless he/she needs to:
a) create a content in an already set framework (eg. using dedicated style for a publisher accepting LaTeX entries)
b) create very complicated maths / music score (I mean he REALLY knows what he is going to achieve).
TeX/Latex is _typesetting_ machine, so it _typesets_ a content, nothing more. It's up to an author to provide the structure of content, and there are no aids/handicaps.
In fact if one uses basic classes, he just gets nice output. But if you want to get REAL BOOK (I mean good typesetting on bookstore level) you must break with creating content and work with low level non-structural typesetting commands/macros. This work is to be done on editor's side --- in fact it is my job, I earn by typesseting books with LaTeX, not creating them 
, absolutely not on writer's/author's side.
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On the other hand, while I dearly love LaTeX, I'd much rather see an author concentrate on writing content, rather than spending the weeks it'd take to learn what he'd need to know about LaTeX.
Well, it took me one afternoon to get the first 30 pages of my thesis from OpenOffice to TeX. Main reason to do that was that I was wasting too much time fighting the way OpenOffice dealt with embedded images. TeX produced an excellent layout without me even worrying about layout at all, instead focussing on the content.