Pages not children

Drupal 6.10 and 5.15

At a couple of sites, we have content which really should be divided across multiple pages in order to avoid the yards long pages which I hate and we have been using book pages for this with page 2 and following as child pages. While this works, it means that we are creating new books at times when we don't really need the complexity of a book and the list of books gets cluttered with titles, diluting the utility of the book list as pointing at major content groups. I know we could hide these smaller books in a containing book, but they don't really have anything to do with each other. I notice on several places on this site that content is broken into pages. Is that a module or some other trick which we could use instead of books?