There is something fundamentally wrong with buying a book you don't actually own.
When you purchase an eBook from most major retailers, you are not buying a book. You are licensing the right to read it — a right that can be revoked, restricted, or altered at any time, without your consent and often without your knowledge.
At Irving Books, we do things differently.
When you buy a book from us, it's yours. Forever.
What DRM Actually Means
DRM stands for Digital Rights Management. In practice, it means restrictions — invisible locks built into the files you've paid for. Here is what DRM typically prevents you from doing with books you have bought and paid for:
- You cannot share them. Lend a physical book to a friend? Natural. Try to do the same with a Kindle book? Blocked — or limited to a single 14-day "loan" with restrictions.
- You cannot back them up. Your Kindle library exists at Amazon's pleasure. If your account is closed, suspended, or hacked, your books vanish with it.
- You cannot read them on any device you choose. DRM locks books to specific apps and ecosystems. Buy from Amazon, and you read on Kindle. Buy from Apple, and you read in Apple Books. Your books become hostages to a platform.
- They can be deleted remotely. This is not hypothetical. In 2009, Amazon remotely deleted copies of George Orwell's 1984 from customers' Kindles — without warning and without permission. The irony was not lost on anyone.
DRM does not prevent piracy. Every major DRM scheme has been broken, and pirated copies of bestsellers circulate freely regardless. What DRM does prevent is legitimate customers from exercising the rights they reasonably expect when they buy a book.
Our Approach
Every eBook and audiobook sold through Irving Books is DRM-free.
When you download one of our eBooks, you receive a standard file — typically EPUB or PDF — that you can read on any device, back up to any drive, and keep for the rest of your life. There is no activation, no account requirement, no invisible tether to our servers.
Our audiobooks work the same way. You download standard audio files — high-quality MP3 — and they are yours. Play them in any app, on any device, anywhere in the world. Copy them to your phone, your car, your grandchildren's laptop in thirty years' time. We will never reach into your library and take them back.
This is not a marketing gimmick. It is a statement of principle.
Why This Matters for History
The question of digital ownership takes on particular urgency when it comes to books of history — especially books that challenge established narratives.
We have already seen platforms remove books, demonetise authors, and quietly adjust search algorithms to make certain titles harder to find. A book locked inside a DRM ecosystem is a book that exists at the pleasure of a corporation. A DRM-free file on your hard drive is a book that exists at your pleasure.
David Irving's works have been banned, pulped, and removed from library shelves. His publisher was bankrupted. His books were out of print for years. The one thing that kept them alive was the fact that readers who owned copies — physical copies, on their own shelves — could still read them, share them, and pass them on.
We believe digital books deserve the same resilience. A file you own is a file no one can take from you.
What We Offer
Our digital catalogue includes:
- eBooks in EPUB and PDF formats, compatible with virtually any e-reader, tablet, phone, or computer
- Audiobooks in high-quality MP3, playable in any audio app or device
- Print editions produced on demand through our printing partners, shipped worldwide
Every format, every title, every time — DRM-free and yours to keep.
The Simple Version
We sell books. When you buy one, it belongs to you. That's it. That's the policy.
No corporation should stand between a reader and a book they've paid for. We won't be that corporation.
Browse our complete catalogue and see for yourself.
