itunes and audio books

[Darcy Burnard]

Hi everyone.  Since there has been a lot of discussion recently on  
audio books in itunes, I thought I'd chime in with my thoughts on how  
to make itunes a great way to listen to audio books.
First, if you're using books from audible.com, almost nothing needs to  
be said.  You download the files, open them, they get imported in to  
itunes, and all is well.
If they aren't from audible, you can have the same experience with  
just a few simple things.
If you're ripping books from cd, you'll probably find that each disc  
is made up of many many tracks.  I'd suggest joining these together  
before doing the rip.  This can be done under the advanced menu.   
Then, your book will only be a few tracks instead of a few hundred.   
If your books are already in many mp3s, you can get a script to join  
all of these files together.  But you really don't have to do this.
If I have a book made of multiple parts, here's what I do.  Create a  
smart playlist with the book title under the song name, the author  
under artist, and the playcount set to 0.  What you have then is a  
playlist with all the parts of your book in the right order.  Once  
each track gets played, it disappears from the playlist.  So whenever  
you want to do some reading, just start itunes playing at the top of  
your playlist and you're good to go.
Finally, no matter how you've gotten books in to itunes, I would  
suggest going in to info and making sure that "remember playback  
position", and "skip when shuffling" are both on.
Hopefully this message made sense.  If not, let me know and I'll be  
glad to clarify anything.
Darcy