Re: Content and Style
If you're at the low-rent end of the market, or hack away for the producers of endless shelves of tech books, you're expected to deliver the complete product ready to send to the printer, possibly with the exception of the publisher's copyright page. But also to be able to send intermediate versions in a format that the (likely home-based) "editor", publicist and other cogs in the production chain can read, probably on the laptops they supply themselves - and that's usually Word, or, if you twist their arms, PDF. This does rather explain why a lot of authors might prefer the direct-to-Amazon route as it's not clear what value the "publisher" is actually adding.
