You'd be surprised. I've talked to published authors, and here's the inside scoop: the writing/editing process is often, amazingly, word documents emailed back and forth with hacked up homebrew version control 'systems' and inline comments. Believe it or not. I've seen them. And it only gets worse when there are more editors involved (depending on the content, there can be many).
O'Reilly is working on a similar idea (http://atlas.labs.oreilly.com), which means there is at least some demand by commercial publishers for a system like this. If O'Reilly is working on it, it can't be solved very well.
Anyway, I'm not even targeting commercial publishing, I'm targeting independent publishing.
> you mention essays? Most students would just use google docs
For short essays google docs is fantastic. I don't plan to touch that. But have you tried writing any kind of long-form group research paper (as in, over the course of a semester), especially technical, with google docs or dropbox? I have. It's a nightmare.
> their is adequate substitute products already in the market place
Craigslist and couchsurfing.org were adequate substitutes for Airbnb, Yahoo search was an adequate substitute for Google, and flash drives were an adequate substitute for Dropbox.
Being a single cofounder might have been a negative factor, in your rejection.
Because formatting a book is painful. And you need to use the tools the publishers use (namely - InDesign)
And they import (keeping the styles) from: Word
What would be needed is a way to import from a Markdown type of thing to InDesign (or generate the PDF directly, and I'm not sure Latex caters to all the needs that InDesign caters to)
The problem with automatic conversions are the adjustments that are sometimes needed, as well as things like sideboxes, pictures, etc
But yeah, since it's been used a lot, looks like a very nice something to have. Good luck!
That is a very non-trivial task for any of those companies. Google could get closest fastest, but they're by no means going to churn something out in a month even if the good idea fairy hits one of their product managers. Microsoft, heck it'd take 3 years to see it.
A few years ago, when I first quit my job, I was originally going to start another magazine, but a previous experience in publishing had convinced me that I needed a version control system my writers, editors and advertising sales/production people could use. There wasn't anything available, so I started building something similar.
When I tried to validate it as an actual business, the biggest problem I ran into was that the vast majority of the (magazine publishing) business is in a shambles, nobody knows if they will have jobs in five years and everyone is understandably a little paranoid. Successful publishers could (hopefully) afford to pay me, but they were generally extremely bureaucratic, difficult to penetrate, and averse to change what was (sort of) working for them. New or floundering publishers were interested (and they were seeking something easy to solve this problem), but the most common feedback I received was that they'd love a free tier, but couldn't afford to pay for it.
The most interesting thing I saw during the whole process was an editor's version control system. This person edits a shocking volume using this system:
/desktop/{author-last-name}/{article-name}/draft1-{date}/from-author.doc
or
/desktop/{author-last-name}/{article-name}/draft1-{date}/my-edits-to-author.doc
You've definitely got a great idea and I can vouch that it's needed. Best of luck!!