Book Document vs. Individual Docs - file management

Hi there

I am working with a training company moving all the manuals for their various products from Word to InDesign. So far I have been creating an individual file for each product with master pages etc. What they want to achieve is to have all available pages for a particular product set up as master pages, and then the user and compile the manual with the content they want from the page master panel.

Now we are finding that there are a lot of duplicated pages between docs but with small differences to the text...we are now starting to worry about version control and ensuring that if a change is made to a page in one doc, that it is reflected in all other instances of the page in other docs. This could become a nightmare!

Would using the book feature in InDesign be an option? I know very little about this function, so any advice on how we can manage this would be greatly appreciated! (NB. the content of the individual docs consists of pasted text, it is not linked to the Word files - and the docs all have the same styles).

Thanks.