When you play an audiobook normally on an MP3 Player or on the PC, it remembers your position, so when you go to listen to it again you don’t have to find your place. It doesn’t do this with Zune and it just starts from the beginning again, which is really annoying. Cos if you can have an 8 hrs + audiobook, it’s really hard to remember where your at!

The same problem you have if you have the audiobook downloaded in a Phone7 device as music. Till you haven’t used the audio player for something else, pressing the hardware volume button, the audio tile popup appears and you can start again the music (or audiobook) from the point you previously paused. BUT if you used in the meanwhile the audio player for something else (and it is very probable if you usually continue to listen the audiobook after many hours, the audio starts again at the beginning of the file (the beginning of the chapter).

This doesn’t happen if you are listening an audiobook downloaded from the marketplace (see this post to find them [also in italian])) because, in this case, it is installed as an application and everytime you lauch that specific book, the speaker continues from where you stopped last time [you can also go backward or forward (also from one chapter to an other) using the specific application interface].

So the problem sussist only for MP3 audiobook you have on your PC and you want to download and listen using your Phone 7 device.

The way Zune typically remembers position is by classifying a file as a podcast. It can remember positions in regular MP3 files as long as the device thinks it is a podcast and not a music file.
So an easy solution is to change the genre of the file, before inserting in zune and then sych to your phone.
If you like to have only one file for the book (very often there is an MP3 file for each chapter) you can previously use your favourite mp3 merging tool to merge all episodes to a single file.

Here you can see how to change the file genre to “Podcast”, right clicking on it and choosing “properties” menu item, then Details tab. Click on Genre (“Genere” in italian) and start typing Podcast: after writing the first P letter, a dropdownlist will appear to suggest you the whole Podcast word; so select that checkbox and the whole word will be written; then confirm with OK button.

Drag all that audiobook files into collection-> MUSIC (raccolta-> MUSICA) section in Zune.
 

Zune auto-magically moves it to the PODCAST section as you can see moving to the collection-> Podcast (raccolta ->PODCAST) section.

Then sync to your phone, for example dragging all that podcast files to the  left-down phone icon (if you registered more Phone7 devices to Zune, like I did, then you have to select which one you want to sync with): you need to do so only if you have set, as a preference,  a manual sycronization and not an authomatic one.

That’s all folks!! 😉

PS: here you can find also a PC application that should do the same trick. I did’t try it and it seems to me a more complicated solution, even thought it probably works fine as well!

If you need to find information and a user manual for Zune for Windows Phone 7 you can go here.