Quoting Tao Starbow <starbow@citris-uc.org>:
I am probably missing something obvious, but why not just leverage the parent-child relationships defined in the menu system and do away with book entirely? It seems like the only things book does that menu doesn't is put in the cute next/prev and children links, which would be easy enough to add in. Other than that it is just UI.
From my experimentation with the book module, it also provided a nice feature to chain node entries to a parent. I think the feature is nice and leveraging the API of the menu may help but the idea of book content type is a good one. Perhaps rather than renaming as has been suggested that we look at the properties of a book and enhance the module. There are various types of books and our book module currently tends to gravitate toward chapter books. Within chapter books we find a preface, table of contents, and the body of the book. Some we even find an index. The preface is a summary or teaser of the body of the book, the table of contents is an outline or menu of the body of the book and the index is a taxonomy of the body of the book. The book has a title which becomes a menu which in turn is the table of contents. The preface becomes the first item of the menu. The chapter titles become items of the menu as well as the node title. The chapter has sections which become children of the chapter menu items. Earnie