This is a timely topic for me. I'm just beginning the writing of a technical book. I plan to target epub/mobi. My research thus far has pointed to markdown -> html -> epub/mobi. If you were going to write a technical ebook would you use markdown or an alternative?

What about markdown do you feel limits you in your writing process?

The beauty of markdown is that it’s standardized. If you find your self midway through the book and feel a need to change formats, it’s easy enough to parse and reformat.

My stack is Markdown-Pandora-MiKTeX-PDF with Eisvogel for technical documentation and it works great for my use case. Eisvogel has a “book” typeset.

You need:

- table of contents

- automatic chapter and section numbering

- cross references and automatic tracking of figures, tables etc.

- different styles besides blockquotes such as info sections, warnings, tips

Imho, cross-referencing chapters, pages, figures, tables and the lack thereof in Markdown is the first and most important thing to check how you would like this to be solved.

How about markdown -> PDF (with Typst) -> epub/mobi ?

You might look at DocBook. I haven't used it in ~25 years, and then only for short documents, and it is XML hence quite verbose.

But it's explicitly targeted at technical documentation. If nothing else, searching for DocBook alternatives might give you some ideas.