The Drupal "Book" module is pretty awesome is you want to create structured content of any type which is very common. Removing or re-ordering a page from a book is pleasantly easy; simply select outline on the child-page and the options are there.

But what if you want to remove the top-level page from the book? Well, in what constitutes a slight failing of the Drupal module, the normal method simply isn't available, although there has been some valiant efforts to patch the problem.

There is however a workaround which, in my opinion, is damn cheeky but it works perfectly.

Firstly, remove all the child pages from the book as per the normal method, unless you're stunningly insane. Keeping pages within a book that you're about to remove doesn't make a great deal of sense.

Once that is done assign the top-level page to another book as a child page. This is, of course, a fairly typical method to create multi-level structured content (books within books). But the beauty is that now it is no longer a top-level page it can be removed from the outline as a normal child-page.

Of course, this does mean that no matter what you do, you will have at least one book. At least that page you could mark as 'unpublished'.