This gets argued as a matter of taste, and it mostly is not. The three tools are good at different stages of the same job, and the disagreements come from people comparing them at the stage where their own favourite is strongest.
What each is actually for
Google Docs is a collaboration tool that happens to hold text. Its real feature is that several people can be in the same document, commenting and suggesting, with no version to email around. Nothing else here is close on that.
Word is the publishing industry's format. Tracked changes are the medium editorial work happens in, and a .docx is what an agent, an editor or a typesetter will ask for without thinking about it.
Markdown is plain text with a convention for structure. It is not a word processor and does not try to be. What it gives you is a manuscript that is readable in any editor on any machine in twenty years, and that one production step can turn into a PDF, an EPUB and a web page without being touched between them.
Side by side
| Google Docs | Word | Markdown | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Live collaboration | Best in class | Workable | Via git, which non-technical people will not use |
| Comments and suggestions | Excellent | Excellent | None natively |
| Tracked changes for an editor | Good | The industry standard | Diffs — precise, unfamiliar |
| Works offline | Partly | Yes | Yes, always |
| Your file in ten years | In an account | Probably fine | It is a text file |
| Version history | Automatic | Manual or OneDrive | Complete, if you use git |
| Formatting drift over a long document | Constant | Constant | Impossible |
| One source, several formats | Export and repair | Export and repair | The point of it |
| Learning cost | None | None | An afternoon |
The case against word processors for a book
Not against writing in them — against them being the thing the finished book comes out of.
- Structure is implied rather than stated. A line that is bold and 16pt looks like a heading. Nothing in the file says it is one, so nothing downstream — a table of contents, an EPUB's navigation, a screen reader — can treat it as one. Unless you use real heading styles, which almost nobody does consistently.
- Pasted text carries its old formatting and it accumulates invisibly.
- The page you see is a preview of a print you will not do. It is not the page the PDF will have, and it is certainly not an ebook.
- Exports are approximations. "Download as PDF" gives you a document — margins from the template, no control over page breaks, no embedded design decisions. Five conversion routes and what each costs puts that in context.
The counter-argument is real and worth stating: none of that matters if the book is 3,000 words for one audience in one format. This is a problem that scales with length and with the number of outputs.
The case against Markdown, fairly
- No comments. If your beta readers, co-author or editor need to leave margin notes, Markdown has no answer that they will accept.
- Nothing is visual. Some people write better seeing the page. Markdown gives you the text and defers the page, and that is a genuine loss for those writers.
- Standard Markdown has gaps a book needs — it eats single line breaks, and it has no page break, because it was designed for the web.
- Complex tables and footnotes are less pleasant than in a word processor, and complicated layout is not what it is for.
The hybrid most people land on
The tools are not exclusive, and the sequence below is what working authors converge on without anyone recommending it:
- Draft where the writing goes best — often Docs, because that is where the readers and the comments are.
- Collect feedback in the same place. This is the phase Docs is unbeatable at, and nothing about it needs to be permanent.
- Convert to Markdown once the words are settled. This is the moment the manuscript stops being a conversation and starts being a book.
- Design and produce from the Markdown: type, margins, covers, page breaks, and every format the book needs.
- Keep the Markdown as the master. Corrections go there, and the outputs are regenerated rather than re-edited.
The conversion is easier than it used to be. Google Docs exports Markdown directly (File → Download → Markdown), and Pandoc converts a .docx in one line:
pandoc manuscript.docx -t markdown -o manuscript.md --wrap=noneExpect a tidy-up pass either way: smart quotes, stray emphasis, headings that were bold text rather than headings, and image paths. An hour on a full-length book, and it is the last time you do it.
Choosing, in one question
Will this manuscript be published in more than one form? A PDF and an ebook. A workbook and a handout. A book and a web version. A first edition and, next year, a second.
If yes, the plain-text master pays for itself the second time, and every time after that. If no — one document, one output, one reader — write it wherever you are comfortable and do not let anyone make you feel unprofessional about it.
For the yes case, the whole pipeline from draft to published is the map, and bukpress is the production step: drop the Markdown in, set the type once, and take out a PDF and an EPUB that came from the same words.