When it comes to music, the iPod is the greatest thing since amps that go to 11. Audiobooks, on the other hand, are a completely different beast. While audiobook downloads from the iTunes Store are as simple as a few clicks, getting your existing books from CD, or audiobooks from other stores like eMusic or the free Librivox into your iPod's Audiobooks playlist can be a chore.

The problem is that iTunes (and your iPod) don't recognize audiobooks as audiobooks unless they come from the iTunes Store. If you import an audiobook from CD, iTunes treats those files as music. They won't remember your place when you stop playback, and they won't show up in the Audiobooks playlist. Additionally, you'll often end up with generic track names, making listening to an audiobook an organizational nightmare.

Enter Audiobook Builder, a $9.95 utility from Splasm Software. With just a few clicks, the program can take existing files or audiobook CDs and turn them into bookmarkable audiobooks that iTunes and your iPod will recognize. The software also handles sequential file naming automatically, and can dump its output directly into your iTunes library.

Specify the length of parts the program outputs, and imports into iTunes.

Audiobook Builder allows you to choose an encoding quality (which is great for huge tomes like James Joyce's Ulysses) and lets you break audiobooks into parts of a length that you specify. The program also uses a project-based file system, so you can start importing a book and save your progress to come back to later.

Audiobook Builder's data files are also completely self-contained, so you can even move a project to a different machine and continue where you left off. Both of these features come in handy when you're importing an audiobook from a large number of CDs.

The final screen gives details on the total length, number of chapters, and how many parts will be output with your current settings.

If you're a fan of audiobooks, but frustrated with iTunes' default handling of them, Audiobook Builder is an indispensable utility.

Ray Aguilera is a writer and food geek in the San Francisco Bay Area.