There is a reason for word: Reviewers are used to Word's versioning and change tracking system, where they can suggest edits and the author can accept them or not. My publisher also offered using .prn files but then the reviewers wouldn't have done the full job ... (in the end I cancelled the contract for other reasons, so no idea how well that would have worked out)

Sometimes I wish non-programmers knew how to use Github...

I will admit that, after a few years of writing papers on GitHub with co-authors, that I do occasionally miss the MS Word track changes. Not how I like composing my papers overall, but I don't think I'll ever be happy using Git to properly version prose.

Can Google Docs replace MS Word in this workflow ? It seems intuitive enough and there can be real time collaboration. This might allow authors to not install MS Windows and MS Word

I don't have experience with Google docs, but I don't think they produce layouts which are good enough™ for book printing.

Google docs change tracking probably could be taught, but you are dealing with people who spent lots of time in their workflow and who are resisting to adapt for a single author. Mind that those reviewers and editors switch from book to book depending on frequency of author's feedback. The author is just one between many ...

I beg your pardon? I have never heard of a decent publisher doing the publishing in MS Word, i.e. the process from formatting to printing. The editing most often gets done in Word. As far as I know, Word lacks the formatting capabilities to do professional publishing. But maybe I just misunderstood you, or things have thoroughly changed in the last couple of years.

My story was ~10 years ago. The publisher asked to install a specific printer driver (as Word's rendering depends on printer settings) and using a specific Word template (defining margins, formatting, ...) and final result would be printing to .prn files.

If you look at many contemporary books typesetting is not an important topic for many.

Have you seen https://bookiza.io?

The idea is very interesting, but it seems broken on Edge and not fully working on Chrome: https://imgur.com/a/fL6MyiT

My wife most of her colleagues have moved all their collaborative academic writing to Google Docs, but she still has to copy and paste the final text into Word and fix the citations in EndNote to send off to the publisher.

This. I am regularly working on co-authored papers both in Google Docs and Overleaf, and they both have pros and cons.

Google Docs have a nice change-tracking and commenting system and next to no learning curve. The downsides are the formatting, which is rather unpredictable for complex-ish documents (figures are always a mess), and citations.

Overleaf helps get formatting and bibliography out of the way, but everybody must know at least some LaTeX, and you have to come up with your own comment-and-response system to keep track of what's going on. There is something baked in, but it is not satisfactory. On the other hand, it is very easy to just comment out stuff that is no longer needed in the main text but may still be useful or just serves as easy-to-see revision history.

You could have installed them on a VM for the sole purpose of writing the book. You didn't really wish to see the book published.

I mean, I don't know that I'm fully qualified to psychoanalyze myself, but I was going through a bit of a Stallman-esque phase where I said "No Windows in my apartment!"

I realize it was petty, and there are some regrets in how I handled it, I just thought the anecdote was amusing.

At this point I've decided refuse to deal with publishers/journals/etc. who don't accept .tex. (Unless it's at the explicit request of a close colleague.) .doc(x) is not a professional file format. (Nor is .odt for that matter.)

Did you end up publishing the manuscript elsewhere?

No; I never finished the book as a consequence of the deal falling through. The work I have is probably hidden somewhere on my NAS, though I suspect now the work would make me cringe since I have improved in my programming skills immensely in the last four years.

If you're asking because you want help with some network programming you are doing in Haskell then you can PM me on some kind of social media.

I suggest publishing it. Or publishing something else that's more relevant to your current or future work. And self-publish. A $30 book that you give to a prospective client is like a $30 business card. There's a wide range of self-publishing methods and services, but there are books on that subject that can help you make that decision, how to price it, and market it, etc. If you can provide a sane PDF, you've done most of the work a printing company cares about; the companies that assist in the self-publishing process should be able to accept almost anything, that's their job.

Write it as a reference that even you'd find useful, with emphasis on defining the basics and getting them right, and increasingly lighter when it comes to intermediate and advanced concepts. Those can either form future books or consulting or both. Since you've started writing, it's worth it to go through the whole process and publish. I did it with a conventional big publisher some time ago, but I wouldn't do that again today. The idea a big publisher would require you use Word is very familiar to me, and I think it's ridiculous.

Alternatively, if you don't want to spend any more effort on it, why not find a coauthor. Someone can take the text you have written, update it and refactor it and generally fix it up.

Why didn't you just download virtualbox, download a Windows 10 iso, and pirate >= office 2016 just to please them? If windows deactivates before the book is finished just run kmspico one more time.

Because one shouldn't be forced to illegally obtain and run a second-rate operating system to run a third-rate application?

Umm, because it was illegal? I didn't really want to do for-profit stuff on pirated software.

Lol the office file won't know that it's pirated. Noone will know just get virtualbox, free, win10 iso, free, and pirate kmspico and office 2016 or newer. As far as anyone will ever know you've paid for all of it. Just truck it.