The problem is, even with many (not all) publishers who do books about free software, there are so many in-house macros and templates that work with Word, it's hard not to force authors to use it. Of course, my book's written in DocBook Lite, using vim, but I'm weird that way, and have a couple of macros.

I knew a small poetry publisher that couldn't find any printing houses willing to do small runs in anything other than Word format. There were a lot of wasted cycles at that company, and I almost took a job there to convert things to a more useful format. Long story.

XML's nice for this sort of thing, because XSL can translate it into just about any other format.