I don't know that it's a secret, but I too know exactly what you're talking about because I also listen to a lot of audiobooks, both on my iPhone 4 and my iPod Touch, and when I rip an unabridged audio book into iTunes, you're right, it can produce a staggering number of individual tracks, some as short as 45 seconds or less. Weird.

Fortunately, it's not too complicated to fix things up in iTunes, but you have to do so when you're importing the disk. For reasons I don't fully understand, you can't merge tracks once the files are on your computer (seems like an excellent opportunity for the creation of a third-party utility to accomplish this task, actually).

I was at the used book store yesterday and picked up a copy of Clive Cussler's "Medusa", abridged, on CD. Yeah, it's pulp, shlocky fiction, but it's entertaining and when I'm working out, it's a good listen because you can miss bits and not worry about ruining the story. :-)

Here's how I joined the tracks when I brought the audiobook into iTunes...

First step was to launch iTunes and slip the first audio CD into the player. No surprise, it was a new disk to the Gracenote CD database:

That was perfect, actually, because if you have selected "automatically rip any audio disk inserted" you need to stop it ASAP anyway. Remember, once the tracks are copied, you can't join / merge them.

I clicked on "No" to stop iTunes importing the songs, then selected all of the tracks shown to be on the disk in iTunes:

Here's the trick: select all the tracks on the disk, then choose Advanced --> Join CD Tracks:

You'll see a small vertical rule line show up in iTunes that (subtly) indicates all the tracks are going to be brought in as a single uber-track. While you're here, press Cmd-I to get to the Info window: why not fix things up before import?

As you can see, I enter artist, album, year, and "Audio Book" as genre (though later I'll switch the set of audio files to being seen as a proper audiobook in the Books area of iTunes). If you can find the cover art, it's an easy copy-and-paste step to add artwork here too: just paste it into the Artwork box.

Ready? On the bottom of this window you'll see two options:

A click on "Import CD" and you've just brought in the many short audio book tracks as one big hour long track. Very useful!

We're not done yet, though. Let's continue to tweak this so that it works optimally within the iTunes environment.

Specifically, let's go back to the Info section, but this time you'll want to be looking at the imported track that's within the iTunes library, not the CD data. I searched for "medusa" to find it. Click on it and choose File --> Get Info...

Note here that I've added the artwork for the audiobook. Thanks Google Images. :-)

Click on the 'Options' tab along the top and you'll see the key elements that'll make this a true audiobook, not just a huge music track:

To turn this into a proper audiobook to iTunes, choose "Audiobook" as the media kind, then set "Remember Position" to yes (I haven't done that yet in this screen shot) and I always mark that it should be skipped when I'm in shuffle mode because, well, it's jarring to have an audio book show up when you want to just groove on some tunes!

Save the changes, then go to the Books section in iTunes and scroll down to Audiobooks...

There ya go! A little bit of work, but it sure makes your audiobook a lot easier to enjoy!