Personally, all of my short form spoken word comes in the form of podcasts, and tend to focus on non-fiction topics, mostly technology. I know there are great radio programs and so on, but for fiction I stick with novels. And there, because I am working with only a couple of tracks per book, I find the grouping mechanisms offered by my iPhone to be pretty solid, and being separate from Music is an advantage.

This on-device management is one of the reasons I now recommend iOS-based devices as the best devices for audiobooks. There are significant differences in how the iPhone and iPod Touch handle audiobooks, that make them much easier to work with than the older “classic” devices like your nano. Even the new Nano Touch isn’t much better than the older scroll wheel-based nanos. Very good, but not in the same league as iOS devices.

At any rate, you certainly seem to prefer your strategy for managing your content, but I think your recommendation of “never, and I mean never” is a little extreme! I can’t endorse it as something I’d use myself, as I’m pretty convinced that it’s a work-around for a specific use case: lots of short tracks on a classic iPod. Glad it works for you!

Why do this? Because it lets you search spoken word tracks on your ipod by genre. Audiobook tracks just sit on your ipod in a list. ou can’t search them by genre so they can be very hard to find. It’s much better to search by genre from the music menu. In fact ‘genre’ is always the first button I push on my nano’s home screen. And you can invent your own genres. I have, ‘plays’, ‘novels’, ‘mystery’, ‘short stories’, ‘comedy’, ‘renaissance drama.’ As for music I have ‘classical/instrumental’, ‘classical opera’, etc, as well as ‘modern.’

Most of my spoken word files come from recordings from BBC radio (the only true source of good radio comedy and drama in English) or from the itunes store. You can even turn podcasts into music tracks and search for them using genre.

Of course I’d have a least 100 spoken word files on my ipod nano at one time

So, here’s an even better tip: the Audible app has a built-in sleep timer. If you get your content from Audible, that’s yet another way that the Audible app is superior to the standard iPod app for playing audiobooks.

1. Go into the Clock app, and tap Timer in the bottom right corner.
2. Set the amount of time to e.g. 30 minutes.
3. Tap the When Timer Ends button, and scroll down to the very bottom of the list. Most everything is alarm sounds, but at the very bottom is a separate item Sleep iPod.
4. Tap Sleep iPod, and then tap Set in the top right corner.
5. Tap the Start button.
6. Switch to the iPod app, and start your program. It will fade out when the timer ends, and your iOS device will go to sleep.

HTH!

Have you found any app which includs a timer? What procedure should I use to listen to audio books on my Touch using no additional apps?

As for being frustrated with your Nano, it sounds like you need to learn to use the (non-obvious) controls for dealing with longer tracks. See my post on this topic, “Backing Up in an Audiobook”:http://aldoblog.com/2009/04/backing-up-in-an-audiobook/. And there is lots more on the topics of iPods and audiobooks here on the site, most of which is relevant to the Nano, which was my preferred iPod for many years.