New owner w/bookmarking question

I just bought and set up my Sansa Clip.  I used to own a Rio Carbon until the hard drive died.

I listen to audiobooks and when I was researching I heard the new firmware allowed bookmarking here and that was a big factor in my purchase.  However, now I am confused.

If I am understanding what I have read and seen with the Clip myself, it works as follows.  If I have an audiobook that I ripped from CD, then I have an file for each CD with the tracks on it.  If I am listening to the book and want to switch to music, I will have to know which CD and track the book was on before I leave so that I will be able to get back to it.  Only then, will it ask if I want to resume and will get me to the correct part of that track that I was on.

do I have this correct, or am I missing something big?

Because…this doesn’t seem very helpful at all.  When you rip a big book, all of the CDs have titles like “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows CD1” which only shows up as “Harry Potter and the” on the display.  Then you have to know what track you were on.  If this were an audible book where they don’t break up the download into small pieces, I could see the assist, but I can’t figure out how to make this help me with a large ripped audiobook.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.  I love the little Clip and hope I am just missing something obvious to everyone else!  I loved the bookmarking feature on the Rio but it was a true bookmarking feature.  All you had to do was hold down the center button for a few seconds and the bookmark would be placed in the spot you were on. It also allowed for multiple bookmarks, loved it but can live without it, but I really hope I am misunderstanding this “feature” because it seems pretty useless under the conditions I stated above.

Thanks for any help in advance. 

I’m a new clip owner myself (4GB) and i love it. I can’t answer your question, but one thing I’ve discovered is that if i drag and drop podcasts from my itunes podcast folder into the clip’s “audiobooks” folder, you can leave the podcast at any point, go listen to some tunes, and then go back to the podcast - the clip asks you if you want to resume where you left off - cool!

sorry, never tried an audiobook.

What you describe is the way it is designed.  This was discussed in earlier threads when the latest firmware came out.  The current workaround is to use a merge tool (mp3merge?) to put all the mp3s into one big file.

Thanks for responding to my question.  I downloaded a merge program, merged all the files and loaded it onto the Clip.  This should solve the problem but in my opinion the design is flawed.   It would make more sense to ask if a person wants to resume as soon as they choose Audiobook or Podcast.  Since there is only one “bookmark” this would take them to where they left off without having to remember which track they were on or which podcast they were listening to.  If they wanted to listen to another book or podcast they would then say “no” and go further into the menu to make their selection.  The problem is that when you are listening to a book, the “CDs” and tracks are really transparent to the listener, it just continues linearly.  If you have to stop to see where you left off, which can be a pain to wait for the title to scroll across the screen, the resume really is of very little benefit.   If you forget to check where you were, you can’t even listen to a track then advance with the arrows to the next and the next until you get close to where you were because they locked the arrow keys. This is all particularly irksome to me as I am visually impaired and need to get out a magnifying glass just to read the display so forcing me to go to the menu over and over gets old very quickly.  This is why I listen to audiobooks in the first place, I can’t read them anymore.

Hopefully, Sandisk will make a few more changes in their next release to make their bookmark more useful, it really wouldn’t take much. 

And, just because I hate to be so negative, I do want to say I like many things about the clip, especially the fact that they are willing to add features within their firmware updates rather than just making a new mp3 player with the new features and trying to force people into “upgrading”.  Bravo for that!