+1 for this request.

I think it would be good to be able to split the library - music, podcasts, audiobooks.  That way, using your favourite method of random play all doesn't give you 18 songs, Chapter 72 of an Audiobook and a podcast from three weeks ago.  

I would like to see this as well (with the libraries kept separate). Having some connection to something like librivox.org could be nice, if only as a pointer towards content. 

I think most of this can be achieved using smart playlists already.

Relevant mailing list post: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/banshee-list/2009-April/msg00112.html

Ideally we'd group by book or series (just different terminology for "album"?), I think.  We could have the book/series list be the only list visible by default, and let select to then view a track list?  Or we could just have the normal browser/track list view.  As David mentions, the tracks for audiobooks are kind of annoying to manage/think about.

What about other behavior?  Here are some ideas:
Double clicking a book would start playback where you left off
Next would skip tracks
Random could be disabled

I have some very basic work toward making a new library source started here:  http://gitorious.org/projects/banshee/repos/mainline/logs/audiobooks_etc

It would be nice to see this developed more and brought in (in some form) to the next release.

I have quite a lot of audiobooks and it's a pain when they start playing when I play the whole music library on shuffle. I know I can avoid this by creating a custom playlist that excludes certain tags, but that's not the point.

I'd especially like audiobooks to not be registered on last.fm so people stop beating me up for listening to Harry Potter every night =)

I've committed a basic library for Audiobooks.  It needs quite a bit more work be slick, but it's already useful for partitioning your spoken-word files from your music.  You can also specify if/how to sync files from it to devices.

Oh, I didn't mention that I have the extension disabled by default; visit Edit -> Preferences -> Extensions tab and enable it.