Know an mp3 player good for long talks?

I recently downloaded about a dozen hours of talks that I really enjoy
when they became available as mp3s, and loaded them on to a player.
Mostly it worked really well. I put a pair of industrial silencers over the
ear pieces, and even on a looong Greyhound trip had really good quality
sound.

But there were a couple of problems. The AAA battery would only play
2 to 3 hours and the player thought the talks were all between 10 and
20 minutes long, even though they were actually 30 to 90 minutes long.
It would play the whole talk, but if I put it on pause after the length of
time the player had the talk listed at, I couldn't get it to resume at the
same spot and had to start over. I can understand that they were
expecting music which is not that long, but does anyone know of a
player that will handle times like that properly?

Everyone I asked on the bus trip said they are hard on batteries. Iriver
makes one that uses an AA battery and claims 40 hours of playback on
it. Not sure I believe that, but it would be nice. The one I have is a
Sandisk 2 gb. I'd be happy to recommend the talks but they are not a
free download.