Out Smarting iTunes (Turning collections of mp3 into an Audiobook)

I love having an iPod. I hate iTunes. It seems like they've tried to make everything I want to do hard. They have tried to make their design clean and unintimidating which means that it is nearly impossible to doing anything other than the most obvious things.

The thing I want to do is download a collection of mp3 files that make up an audiobook and have my iPod see it as an audiobook (such as from audio.lds.org, the local library, or librivox). If you've never done this, there are several advantages to audiobooks over having the iPod think of the files as music. 1) The iPod keeps track of where you were in the file even if you've played other files in between. 2) On the Touch (likewise the iPhone, I'm assuming) there is a back 30 seconds button so you can remember what was going on. 3) And my favorite feature is the 2x play speed which speeds up the recording (it isn't really 2x but more like 1.5x).

Anyway, if you search the internet for how to do this, you will find lots of ways to do this. However, in this case TIMTOWTDI is bad because most of the ways of doing it involve multiple manual steps with third-party software and re-encoding the file. I finally found one that is only a few steps involving iTunes and no re-encoding. To my great irritation, it was a feature available in iTunes all along buried deep in the options of the files' metadata. (Why couldn't they just have a right-click option called "Treat this album as an audiobook"? )

I realize this is just a rant now but hopefully someone else won't waste all the time I've wasted.