Hi Aldo
I’m not sure what would be the limiting factor here, because of course 600 pages of text will likely have very different handling than one which has a load of embedded and linked images/files, which will be different from one with a simple master frame vs one with complex layout.
I don’t really see a disadvantage in working with Indesign book files and breaking a document down into separate chapter files. (I don’t know anything about in5 though.) I never get any kind of machine slowdown working on indd files up to 70-80 pages (~10-50MB files depending on content), which might be one consideration of handling much larger documents, but Indesign does sometimes decide that it doesn’t like something and I get into a crash loop every time I try to do a particular edit. File recovery seems to be very good, so I rarely *lose* work, but it is incredibly annoying and wastes time while I try to figure out what is causing the crash (almost always it is an edit that causes some kind of content reflow that it can’t handle).
So, I guess personally I would say it’s useful to work with separate chapters simply so that the chance is reduced of any one particular part of the book having a problem that could corrupt the whole thing.
Nick
.
