Word perfect: inside our audio book department

PUBLISHED - 23rd October 2025

Adding audio books to Torch’s library and eShop is always a challenge because so much work is involved yet we still want to produce the books quickly, whilst they’re current. Thankfully Torch is able to call upon a host of volunteer readers and editors who are not only talented but also extremely hard working. A typical book will take about four weeks to record and most of the readers will juggle that with recording other things for Torch such as daily Bible reading notes, the monthly Premier Christianity magazine and various in-house Torch publications.

Currently we have ten readers; they check their recordings as they go before their final work is re-checked by one of two volunteer editors or myself. Normally a few re-reads are required at that stage but quite often the original recordings are word perfect, even on a 300-page book.

For those clients who need a book in a hurry, such as one being used on a course at their church, or who want to read some obscure academic Christian book which is unlikely to be used by anyone else, we will recommend text-to-speech (TTS) i.e. a book read by computer using synthetic speech. TTS uses AI voices which are surprisingly good, to the extent some clients express disbelief when told they’re not real! I have one volunteer, Brenda, who works exclusively on TTS. You might imagine such a book can be produced by a computer instantly but several hours of preparation are put in by Brenda before the ‘AI’ is clever enough to understand what’s being asked of it.

Sometimes we are able to persuade an author to record their own book for us, which is a great way of bringing the book to life. Recently George Lings has recorded In the Autumn of Life and Lizzie Hunt has recorded Healing in the Potter’s House. In Lizzie’s case I’ve been able to persuade her to stay on and record a regular Torch book for us, look out for The Visitor by Lori Wick, coming soon!

Increasingly publishers are producing their own commercial audio books, especially of their bestsellers. This is a good thing in general but not always helpful for blind and partially sighted people because the books can be a lot more expensive than the print version and for many the technology involved is not accessible. However, on occasion, Torch is able to get royalty-free access to these recordings to make accessible versions for our library; two recent ones are The Jesus Storybook Bible and A Knock at the Door, read by its author Rob Parsons.