Well, the pages are supposed to stay in the book. There is one book per world and it contains the world info and the characters you've played in that world.
So if you open a book for a particular world (or connect to a server) the first page has the world/server info and a list of characters. Maybe with some search functions if you have a lot of characters. I think I will probably also preload the last three or five characters viewed into appendix pages in the book with their own bookmarks so that you could quickly page between them. In other words, when you open the book after having played before then your character summary pages are already there up to a limit. You can either "next", "next", "next" through them or just click the bookmarks for them.
Creating a character essentially (temporarily) clears the book so that you can only access the pages needed to create that character. This keeps me out of a lot of 'what if the player selects another character while they are editing this character' issues... and simplifies what may already be a complicated UI by limiting it to just its function. Once the character is created or canceled then the rest of the book is available again.
(Interesting note: this also got me out of nested bookmarks... which I spent 3-4 hours this weekend designing and then undesigning as I realized the modality problem above. The book with "everything" in it required subsection bookmarks and started to become a real mess. This way is nice and clean and simple.)
The player journal will use this interface also. Each section, "Character", "Skills", "Property", "Blueprints", etc. will have its own bookmark and the first page will be a table of contents for easy jumping. The table of contents will only exist when there is enough information to spill off of the sections main two pages. Unlike a real book, my table of contents will always fit on one page since it will have a scroll bar.