I'm not sure if I'm going to explain this right, because I get confused when I try to sort it out myself, so how much luck am I going to have trying to actually communicate it? But here goes...
When your total number of stored articles exceeds the maximum you've set for a page, you access the "overflow" by clicking the links Drupal automatically sets up for you at the bottom of the page. The default setup for these links is to list the number of "pages" available, and to also give you "first," "previous," "next," and "last" links. These links work very well, but I have to admit that they feel counter-intuitive to me: they feel backwards. When you click on the "next" link, you're not actually viewing the next piece of content, you're viewing earlier content.
So, for example, when you're reading a book, going to the next page takes you to the next part in the story -- the future. But when you're reading through a Drupal site, clicking the next link takes you to a previous part of the "story" -- the past.
The Book content in Drupal doesn't do this, however -- it places its pages chronologically, so that the link on the left is the previous chapter, and the link on the right is the next chapter.
So what I'm wondering is, is there a way to make the way Book links work a universal format for Drupal?