My current list of projects all have XML involved either right at the front end in Editorial or the processing XML from somewhere else and formatting it to eBooks and/or other formats.

For instance, innovative new authoring tools enable content to be created in XML using interfaces indistinguishable from Microsoft Word.

Does the interface even have to be that complex? For certain types of books, probably not. A while back, I mused about using an application with a very constrained interface and constrained templates to create documents using XML.

Obviously, this sort of solution won’t work for every type of book or document. And writers will need to get over the fact that the editor isn’t Word (or their favourite word processor) and doesn’t work like it.