While looking through some articles, I stumbled upon these two, which I thought might be of interest in the case of automating book workflows. Perhaps you might be able to gather some gems from this discussion/articles:
http://programming.oreilly.com/2013/...uthorship.html
http://www.balisage.net/Proceedings/...einfeld01.html
Glad to see that other great minds think alike, with the "digital first" and then work backwards to print... instead of the dreadful waste that is happening currently by going the other way around.