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I've used (and own) Framemaker, QuarkXPress, Pagemaker (no longer own), Ventura, and InDesign. By far the best of the lot for long documents like books was Ventura. I only stopped using it a year ago when InDesign CS4 was released. Even though Ventura is now approximately 10 years away from its last upgrade, it still can outperform -- in most instances -- any of the other programs. Alas, it is out of date and unsupported, so it now sits on my computer unused.
But of those still living and breathing, InDesign is, I think, the best of the bunch. Quark's biggest failures were its cost and its support. To properly do a nonfiction book in Quark required the purchase not only of the base program for $800, but thousands of dollars of add-ins. I nearly had heart failure when I realized that I had nearly $10,000 invested into Quark-related software. At least with InDesign CS4 you can get by without any plugins and Ventura (which cost $250) was a complete package requirng no add-ins at all.
Now if only Adobe would teach InDesign how to do ePub . . .
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