Many of the people posting to this thread make the assumption that Sigil is always used as a final editor and tweaker before publishing to ePub format, and that book view is not needed. I work with about 25 editors and writers in small publishing companies and our original intention was also to use Sigil as a final editor and tweaker in our tool chain. In reality that is not what happens in most use cases.
In real world usage most of us have a tool chain and do use other tools such as word processors and Google Docs to originate content and then import into Sigil at some point. HOWEVER, a huge amount of modification and rewriting ends up taking place in Sigil. I can give you many reasons why this is the case if you are interested, but we always end up doing doing a substantial amount of writing in Sigil.
We DO NOT LIKE TO SEE HTML CODE AND CSS WHILE WE ARE WRITING. We write in Book View so that we can concentrate on the content without distracting HTML tags. Then we go back later in Code View and fix any html anomalies that might have been introduced by Book View. This is a small price to pay for having a pseudo wysiwyg writing interface. You can go on all day about the supposed evils of wysiwyg or wysiwym interfaces, but most writers DO NOT WANT TO SEE HTML while they are trying to concentrate on writing content. After we get the writing done we switch to Code View and fix the damage - no problem, no complaints. Yes,, it would be great if Book View was perfect and did not have any quirky behavior, BUT having Book View even with its quirks is a godsend for productivity.
Shoulda Woulda, I can hear many of the people that have already posted to this thread saying "but you should not be trying to write in Book View, etc, etc." The reality is that many people do write in Book View every day and that Book View is one of the MOST IMPORTANT features of Sigil to most writer-editors.
I wish to give a heartfelt thanks to Kevin Hendricks, Doug Massay, John Schember, Grant Drake, Dave Heiland, Charles King, Daniel Pavel, Grzegorz Wolszczak and all of the other contributors to Sigil.
You have provided us with an invaluable tool. We are small publishers and writers, many of us struggling financially. Sigil is the centerpiece and main workhorse of our publishing toolchain.
