I'm trying to figure out the Drupal notion of a "book".
My initial impression was that by "collaborative writing effort" was something like a wiki.
As noted on the parent page, one feature of a wiki that seems to be missing is the automatic generation of a table of contents based on the headings in the page.
* That would be nice. I haven't seen anything that does it. I found http://api.drupal.org/api/file/modules/book/book.module/5 which contains: "book_toc, Returns an array of titles and nid entries of book pages in table of contents order" so maybe there is a way to do this. JHH 10/24/08
I'm also wondering if a "book" is fundamentally linear or if can be seen as a hierarchy. I think this page is part of a book, so obviously there's a hierarchy. But in outline dialog, there's the notion of the parent page and a weight that seems to have a single level of content.
* Yes, it's hierarchy. The left sidebar navigation bar shows it. Weight allows changing order in a list from alphabetical. I don't understand "outline dialog." JHH 10/24/08
Refs for more reading:
http://www.darcynorman.net/2006/05/24/wiki-vs-drupal-book/ -- one takeaway is that while MediaWiki will generate the TOC from the semantic information on a page, a Drupal book will generate a TOC from the hierarchical arrangement of the pages in a book.