Reply To: Which approach for laying out a book is best?

I agree with Ariel: the Book panel feature is great in some situations but I suggest using it only when necessary.

You can easily put each chapter in its own “story” in a single document. (A story can be multiple text frames threaded together across pages.) Then you can move those chapters around by selecting the pages in the Pages panel and dragging them to a new position. To do that more easily, you can make the Pages panel thumbnails bigger (use Panel Options in the panel menu) and you can even use color labels to identify different chapters.
https://creativepro.com/keep-your-pages-in-order-with-color-labels.php

That said, you definitely could put each chapter in its own InDesign document and then combine the docs into a book panel. There’s lots more on this subject at Lynda.com/LinkedIn Learning.

Break a leg! :-)