Printed Book - Distributed Input to Book Revision

I do have the images in a separate file, but as the editor, I made my text changes in InDesign so the original Word documents don't match.  And now that the material needs to be updated (7 years have passed and things changed) I want the author of the material to provide it.  Thanks for the suggestions.  Margo

You could just export the stories from InDesign as .rtf files. These files can be opened in Word, the styles and formatting will be retained, and when you place those Word docs back into InDesign for the next version, you can map the Word styles to the InDesign styles and bring the copy in already formatted.

Your best choice is to use Recosoft's ID2Office plugin:
ID2Office - How to Convert InDesign to Word, Convert InDesign to PowerPoint

Moved from Adobe Creative Cloud to InDesign.

I take it your original layout is done in InDesign CS4?

The way it normally works is that the writers/editors use a word processor to prepare the copy, and the layouter/designer imports these documents into InDesign. Ideally you would 1) synchronize the Word styles with paragraph styles in InDesign, and 2) ensure the images are kept separated from the Word files, because you must be able to import those separately. Having embedded images in Word is a nightmare - avoid that at all costs.

Ordinarily you would provide the original Word text files to the people responsible to update the text files. Those Word files (and templates) would have the correct paragraph styles already added to them, and you would ensure the writers/editors are informed that they should only use those, and forbid any manual formatting.

If you do not have original Word files or templates, you can provide them with exported text files. Better to ignore any formatting done by the writers, and re-do it yourself in InDesign.

Word of warning: the formatting and images are inconsequential for the writers. You are only interested in updating the texts in the InDesign file, correct? That means the formatting, layout, and images ought to be separated from the copy writing stage.

If images must be updated as well you must set up a separate stream in your workflow for those, with proper resolution guidelines.