TL;DR -- another book-writer discovers the thing of beauty that is Scrivener. I've written one book 100% in it, and used it to refactor three others (when their multiple plot threads were threatening to get out of hand). It's not that it does anything magical at the word processing level, but it makes the structure of a book-length work transparent.
(If you don't write books for a living, the best metaphor I can give you is this: imagine you've been writing code for years using just a text editor. (If your editor is Emacs, congratulations: that's the MS Word of text editors -- kitchen sink included, but not everything ideally placed unless you do a lot of customization.) Then someone shows you an IDE. That's Scrivener: it's basically an IDE for books.)
> If your editor is Emacs, congratulations: that's the MS Word of text editors -- kitchen sink included, but not everything ideally placed unless you do a lot of customization.) Then someone shows you an IDE.
That analogy doesn't stand at all. Most of the people whose editor of choice is Emacs(mine is Vim) have known about IDEs all along, have used them at some point of time, or may be still use it for languages which are too verbose to do without IDE code generation. They chose not to use it, or use it sparcely. There is no someone showing you an IDE.
The beauty of emacs/vim is that they are a. highly optimised to enable quick editing of any text document, not just a specific subset of languages, and b. highly customisable - the customisation isn't an annoying overhead, rather it lets you define exactly how you want the environment to be whereas an ide tends to be harder to customise to that degree.
Horses for courses.
As an aside - I think the analogy fails purely in terms of quality, word is a horrible mess and a nightmare to work with, emacs is a (sometimes clunky) thing of beauty.
> If your editor is Emacs, congratulations: that's the MS Word of text editors -- kitchen sink included, but not everything ideally placed unless you do a lot of customization
I won't deny Emacs has everything, but the analogy to Word shows you don't use it. By not being an IDE with all the fluff that comes in IDEs, it allows me to focus on the code I write (I use Eclipse and NetBeans when writing Java code because so much of the work is boilerplate code generation) and nothing else. My hands don't need to leave the keyboard and there are no overlapping windows to shuffle around. And it's endlessly customizable - the "configuration files" are executable programs and, while its dialect of lisp is somewhat anachronistic, it's much better than writing Eclipse plugins in Java (or Word macros in VBA).
Perhaps a better analogy (and one that's a little less likely to cause a holy war) be - you were using RC to back up your program file. Then somebody showed you git (or hg).
But honestly, your comment on IDEs being superior to emacs (vim user here) casts doubt on your other opinion. It's like saying congratulations for using bash, then someone showed you Windows. (That said, being Charles Stross casts confidence on your other opinion.)
(If you don't write books for a living, the best metaphor I can give you is this: imagine you've been writing code for years using just a text editor. (If your editor is Emacs, congratulations: that's the MS Word of text editors -- kitchen sink included, but not everything ideally placed unless you do a lot of customization.) Then someone shows you an IDE. That's Scrivener: it's basically an IDE for books.)