Ok, I'm new to this, so if this is obvious please forgive me. I can't seem to find the answer to this simple sounding question. Can someone please help?
I have had a subscription to Audible.com for several years and I have a couple of hundred books available there, let's say 20GB worth.
I have a Windows XP laptop with a 40GB hard drive that I would like to use for (mostly) business purposes.
I have a shiny new 60GB iPod.
I know how to download from Audible to my laptop. Once they are there, iTunes detects their presence and places them into its database. Since they come in parts and iTunes doesn't realize they are part of the same book, I put the books' names in the Albums portion of the entry. 'Most everything shows up as the Audiobook genre, which I find annoying since everything I have there is an Audiobook, but that's another story (e.g. there's no Mystery genre.) Then I consolidate the files in iTunes to make a copy in the iTunes database. Then I delete the files from the Audible database. Now I have one copy of the file on my laptop. Next I plug in the iPod and everything gets moved to the iPod automatically.
At this point, the books exist at Audible, on my laptop and on my iPod. I would like to delete them from my laptop and leave only a copy at Audible and a copy on my iPod. But I would like to be able to add any new books I get to my iPod.
It seems that if I delete things from iTunes on the Laptop, they get deleted from the iPod too during the synchronization process.
How do I accomplish that? (simple steps please.)

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