Importing audiobooks from CD

Question

I'm trying to help my daughter to import a couple of audiobooks from CD into iTunes.  I'm used to downloaded audiobooks (mainly from Audible) where an unabridged reading is stored in a small of files (usually from 1-3), each of which is broken up into multiple chapters.  Looking at the CDs, though, there are multiple discs (7 or 8) per book, and each disc is broken up into 70-75 tracks, each about a minute long.  The sleeve notes list the correspondence between tracks and chapters - some of these span two discs, e.g., the book chapter consists of tracks 50-70 of one disc and tracks 1-10 of the next disc.
I know that iTunes allows tracks can be merged on import, so in this example I could select the tracks that make up each chapter to merge and import these as one file.  I've never used this, though, and have a couple of questions:
After import, are the original CD track boundaries recognized within the resulting files, i.e., is it possible to skip forward or backward based on the original tracking?
Is there any way to create one file that merges tracks from two different CDs?
I'm assuming that the answer to the second question in no, so that I'll end up with several pairings of tracks Chapter X, Part 1 + Chapter X, Part 2.
Given that iTunes doesn't seem to have all the capabilities needed to convert from CD to "Audible-like" audiobook files, are there any third party utilities (preferably free!!) that can do the job better?  Do any such utilities use existing audio files, as opposed to CD tracks, as input?

Answer 1

Thanks - useful info (as always), though it doesn't address the specifics of converting a multi-disc, many-short-tracks CD set to a much smaller set of longer files.  So far I'm just working with what iTunes gives me and will end up with 21 files averaging 24-25 minutes rather than nearly 500 one-minute tracks ... this is good enough for immediate purposes, though I'd still like an ability to convert sources like this to "real" audiobooks.