Audiobooks: A New Format for Classic History

The Audiobook Revolution

The audiobook market has grown by over 25% annually for the past five years. For many readers, audio has become the primary way they consume non-fiction — during commutes, exercise, or the countless hours of daily life where hands and eyes are occupied but the mind is free.

David Irving’s books have been notably absent from this revolution. Major publishers dropped his titles decades ago, and the independent publishing operation at Focal Point concentrated on print editions. The result is that some of the most important primary-source histories of the Second World War have been unavailable in audio format.

Until now.

AI Narration: A New Possibility

The traditional audiobook production process — hiring a professional narrator, booking studio time, editing and mastering each chapter — typically costs between $5,000 and $20,000 per title. For a catalogue of over thirty books, many of them running to 600 or 800 pages, the investment would be prohibitive.

Advances in AI text-to-speech technology have changed the equation. Modern TTS systems can produce narration that is natural, expressive, and consistently high quality across chapters that may take twenty or thirty hours to read aloud. The technology is not perfect — it occasionally stumbles on German proper nouns or complex sentence structures — but it is good enough to make these books genuinely listenable.

The Production Process

Each audiobook goes through a multi-stage production pipeline:

• Text preparation. The source text is cleaned and formatted for narration. Numbers are written out, abbreviations are expanded, and German words and names are annotated with pronunciation guides.
• Chapter segmentation. The text is divided into chapters and then into smaller chunks that the TTS system can process while maintaining consistent voice quality.
• Generation. Each chunk is processed through the AI model, using a voice profile calibrated for clarity, appropriate pacing, and the formal register that suits historical non-fiction.
• Mastering. The raw audio is processed to meet professional audiobook standards — including loudness normalisation, noise reduction, de-essing, and the addition of room tone for natural-sounding chapter breaks.

The final product meets the ACX (Audible) technical specifications: 44.1kHz sample rate, consistent loudness at −20 LUFS, peak levels below −3dB, and a noise floor below −60dB.

What’s Available Now

The first titles are already available. Banged Up, David Irving’s account of his imprisonment in Austria, was the inaugural audiobook release and has proven popular with listeners. Additional titles are in production, with the major works — Hitler’s War, Churchill’s War, and The Destruction of Dresden — prioritised for release.

Accessibility and Preservation

Beyond convenience, the audiobook programme serves a deeper purpose. David Irving is now in his late eighties, and the question of how his work will be preserved and disseminated for future generations is becoming urgent. Audio versions ensure that these books will be accessible to people who may never pick up a 900-page hardback — but who are nonetheless interested in what the original documents actually say about the most consequential conflict in human history.

All Irving Books audiobooks are sold DRM-free. When you purchase an audiobook, you own it — no subscription required, no platform lock-in, no risk of the title being removed from a library.

“The audiobook format brings Irving’s narrative gifts to life. His books read like thrillers built from real documents — they were always meant to be heard.”
— A listener review