Here are two drupal changes that would help submitter usability a bit by cutting down repetitive actions. I have no idea how hard or easy they are since I don't know drupal much, but they seem like simple things.
1) when adding pages to a book you have to set the weight field which determines the order of pages. That field should be automatically set to the next page index (auto-incremented), since this is the most common use case I think - people usually import book chapters in order.
2) when a book has a location set, the child pages should inherit that location when they are being created. many books are about a single location, so it's annoying to re-enter the same data over and over again for each chapter, sometimes I forget to do this and some pages end up assigned to the default location - UK.
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Hi, thanks for your comments, and all the work posting up processed world!
With the books, if they're on the same weight then they get ordered alphabetically.
So most texts in book format have numbered chapters, and so do automatically go in the correct order.
Setting up that auto increment you propose would cause problems because many books have more chapters than there are weight options.
With some "books" like the processed world ones you are doing, or like magazine issues in general, usually the actual order of the texts in the book doesn't matter, so you won't normally have to worry about the weights. And let's say you want to always have the editorial at the beginning, and readers letters at the end - but then that's still only two weights to change, and this is optional.
With the location, do you mean the location in the drop-down box above the Google map? Because we actually don't use that data for anything, so you don't need to worry about what is in it.
With most books, we will only want to give a region tag to the top level book, as subchapters won't have their own tags - as we wouldn't want users to come across a big block of stand-alone chapters of an unknown book looking through a region tag, if you get what I mean.
If any of this isn't clear, sorry, feel free to ask me for clarification.