New applications keep creeping out for Symbian still. In this case, the self-evidently titled Audiobook Reader. It can handle either single files or folders of files, playing one after the other, with bookmarks and direct chapter access. See below for screens and comments.

From the Nokia Store description:

Audiobook Reader helps to organize Audio books:

• It can bookmark position in audiobook and can resume from same position.
• It remembers bookmark for all added audio book. This mean you can play multiple audiobook simultaneously and save its progress independently.
• It supports Audiobook with individual audio file which contain whole book or folder which contain book’s audio file.

And here's the app in action. I grabbed one of the thousands of free audio books from LibriVox:

The app is intuitive, but a good help screen is nice to see too; (right) Selecting a folder of audio book MP3 files to add to my library...

Within the folder, tap the title, as shown here, to select this set of files as a new audio book; (right) Playing back the book, complete with cover art. Note the play progress indicator and the bookmark toolbar....

You can pause and resume at any point by tapping anywhere in the centre of the screen - note the banner ad that also pops up, should you do this. It's not too intrusive though; (right) The bottom right Options menu opos up this list of files/chapters in the current book, in case you want to jump around. It's strictly filenames only though - no chapter names in this audio book's case!

You can bookmark any spot in any chapter/file and then get back to this point later on.

Although Audiobook Reader worked as advertised, I did get a few Qt 'Memory full' errors - your mileage may vary, so let us know how you get on with this (possibly essential) new Symbian application. Are you an audio book fan?

You can download Audiobook Reader for free from the Nokia Store here.

PS. It goes without saying that this doesn't support DRMed audio books, such as those from Audible.