Sorry to take so long in responding... I seem to rotate the frequency of my attention to different tribes, hence the long delay; but better late than never, I suppose.

I'm not quite sure what you mean when you say "first copy." I will assume that you mean that you will be self-publishing and doing your own marketing in hopes of getting it picked up by a larger publisher for another edition, and your focus right now is a format for getting it out in rather than slick production-values.

As far as software goes, the most popular word processing programs could all be adequate for your needs if a fairly straightforward format is what you want: MS Word can adapt to the page-size you want, and I believe can even arrange your pages for saddle-binding.

I'm too anal to be content with Word myself, and I'm a Mac snob, so for many years I worked with PageMaker, which I like best. Now that I use System X, though, there's no version of PageMaker available to me.

I never learned Quark, so I'm basically stuck with InDesign, Adobe's replacement for PageMaker. I don't like InDesign as well as PM, and neither does any other Mac user I know.

I think it would be easier to answer your concerns if I knew what operating system you use and what kind of book you're working with: is it mostly text, or are there lots of graphics? Is it mostly prose or poetry? In other words, will the text be auto-wrapping a lot, or will text need to be placed line by line? Will indexing be a concern? Will you have lots of chapters that can physically be divided up if need be, or will it be one big document that will autoflow across the span of a huge manuscript?

When I was in grad school, one of my profs insisted that WordPerfect was the best program for academic writing with all its footnoting requirements and all, but academic writing involves little opportunity for page design. I never liked WordPerfect for Mac, though--haven't liked it since MS-DOS days, when it was the clearly superior WP program.