Optional Adding content to a personal book

I'm not sure if this is where you're going... When a role is given only permissions for personal books under book-manager module (and none from core book module), then the user doesn't get an outline field showing personal books when creating a new node. But I think this is default behavior for Drupal -- access conditions aren't applied to unpublished nodes.

This means that a user can't add pages until the book is published.

I find that I must publish the book. Since my site requires a workflow approval for both the books and the pages, it would be helpful if the user could add pages/nodes to unpublished books, and have the entire book hidden from public view if it's unpublished, as well as have individual pages shown or hidden based on their publication status separately.

This seems to be non-specific to Book Manager. Is there any way to accomplish this?

I am pretty sure the issue reported by rcorbett is a duplicate of #553094: "None" option missing. Book Manager forces user to create a new book anytime content is saved. which has been fixed. You should now see the option when creating content so you are not forced into creating a book.

Please re-open this if I misunderstood the issue.