The problem is not formatting. Or not only formatting. I've made my peace with InDesign. It's organizing many articles into some sort of coherent whole, and writing chapter intros and other glue, and editing and proofreading, and designing a cover (I've only dabbled in PhotoShop), and etc. It took me a year to do the last one, even though it was "just" organizing articles into a book, and that was using all the scaffolding I built for the first one!

And then making an ebook, I have used Calibre to good effect, but that is also about 10x as hard as it "should" be.