Comment by TheOtherHobbes

The place command does not autoupdate. At least not in the most recent version.

Text is either embedded, in which case it's baked in, or linked, in which case you have to manually tell ID to update the link to reload the text.

But InDesign's EPUB output is horrifically terrible, especially if you're trying to use custom fonts/graphics for page headings. (Basically - no.)

And the CSS is... really not great.

The best fiction off-the-shelf option for EPUB gen is Vellum. It's a one-off payment of around $250 and you can get an EPUB-only version, or EPUB+PDF for print. It's not very customisable, but the presets - there aren't many - all look good.

For anything more sophisticated, options are limited. I spent far too long creating a non-fiction EPUB in ID a couple of years ago. I got there in the end but it was an extremely painful process and I ended up automating a lot of the workflow in JSX.

For fiction I created my own MD -> EPUB pipeline with a custom MD -> HTML parser for custom markup not handled by pure MD. Then a custom EPUB builder which does all the wrapping and general EPUB bureaucracy based on my own CSS.

Python has libraries for Pandoc, native DOCX, and MD (up to a point) so the basics were all there. The rest was glue.

It was a moderately-sized hobby project - would probably go much faster with AI now.