For the most part it's either epub or mobi at this point in the ebook game, with the rare occasional pdf. Epub and mobi are essentially interchangeable thanks to Calibre, and if you need PDF then you probably need more complex formatting than a Markdownesque language can provide.
Converting from Word is a problem, but that's for different reasons: 1) authors (understandably) have no idea how to typeset, so each author has their own special bizarre style that's almost always wrong, 2) the HTML produced by Word is a hideous wreck no matter how you slice it, and 3) each different version of Word produces wildly different, but equally monstrous, HTML.
Sadly the word processing game has been won by Word. 99% of non-techie authors will use Word (or maybe Scrivener) to write their novel and it's tough to convince them to learn a formatting language when they can just press 'bold' on the toolbar.
In either case we already have a format to be invisibly used by writing software: HTML/CSS. It's the underlying language for epub and mobi, it's well understood and easily learned, it was specifically designed for book-like documents (and not web apps funnily enough), and programs already export in that format. The problem is that some programs (like Sigil) do a better job of exporting than others (like Word).
Things like TOCs can be handled by using an open, easily-editable format like epub as a base format, then using Calibre to invisibly compile to different formats. Calibre does a flawless job 99% of the time.
Edit: My creds are that I run one of the largest writing communities online, briefly ran an online ebook conversion service, and have composed and published ebooks myself.
Sadly the word processing game has been won by Word. 99% of non-techie authors will use Word (or maybe Scrivener) to write their novel
That's because publishers rely on Word for workflow because everyone uses Word and they require interoperability.
They don't actually like Word any more than the rest of us do -- they mostly rely on Adobe InDesign for typesetting, and getting Word docs into InDesign is a bit painful unless the author is au fait with the publisher's own style sheet -- and if you talk to their electronic/internet publications specialists they'd love to find a usable alternative platform. Unfortunately they need such a platform to be universal, to support workflow-specific tasks such as copy editing (handled today, not terribly well, via Word's change tracking) or checking page proofs (handled today by going over PDFs until your eyeballs bleed), and to work for everyone they do business with. Scrivener is great, and generates very clean HTML/CSS/ePub, but it stops at the point when you hit "Compile" -- it doesn't interoperate with the proofing/production side of workflow. As for the rest ...
(Credentials: I write novels for a living and in the past week have been discussing this topic with Hachette's head of digital strategy and one of Penguin Random House's digital production specialists.)
Converting from Word is a problem, but that's for different reasons: 1) authors (understandably) have no idea how to typeset, so each author has their own special bizarre style that's almost always wrong, 2) the HTML produced by Word is a hideous wreck no matter how you slice it, and 3) each different version of Word produces wildly different, but equally monstrous, HTML.
Sadly the word processing game has been won by Word. 99% of non-techie authors will use Word (or maybe Scrivener) to write their novel and it's tough to convince them to learn a formatting language when they can just press 'bold' on the toolbar.
In either case we already have a format to be invisibly used by writing software: HTML/CSS. It's the underlying language for epub and mobi, it's well understood and easily learned, it was specifically designed for book-like documents (and not web apps funnily enough), and programs already export in that format. The problem is that some programs (like Sigil) do a better job of exporting than others (like Word).
Things like TOCs can be handled by using an open, easily-editable format like epub as a base format, then using Calibre to invisibly compile to different formats. Calibre does a flawless job 99% of the time.
Edit: My creds are that I run one of the largest writing communities online, briefly ran an online ebook conversion service, and have composed and published ebooks myself.