Books Are Stories. Audiobooks Are Storytelling.

Prefer to listen? Of course you do. Read by AudiobookRush Publisher and Founder Daniel Henning.

We’ve been telling stories for millennia; since we developed language; probably before. (Think cavemen miming to the tribe about the dangers of the giant animal lurking outside the cave, or “the one that got away”.)

We still sit around campfires and tell stories. It is baked into our DNA.

In the mid 1400’s Gutenberg invented the printing press and printed the first modern book, The Gutenberg Bible. Now stories could be told through the printed word, and we didn’t have to share stories with each other person to person. It changed everything.

Well, except for our DNA. Even though we had this new-fangled way of receiving stories, our love for hearing the stories out loud, or performed in front of us by another human has never gone away. I doubt it ever will. It is literally ingrained into who we are, how we experience the world, and how we understand what others are going through.

Books are remarkable things. They give us opportunities to learn about and empathize with other people, cultures, ideas. They expand our worldview and remind us that our own little universes aren’t the only ones out there. They take us places we may never travel to and deliver us to destinations unknown. Stories make us better humans.

But even though we love the experience of snuggling up with a good book, by a warm fire say, our desire to have a story told to us has not gone away. It starts when we’re young: being read to by a parent or a teacher, falling asleep to words spoken out loud that whisk us off to dreamland, being comforted and soothed by the human voice.

Audiobooks are exactly that. They are stories being told to us by another human. Stories that we hear, not read. They hit that deeply ingrained part of our DNA and take us back to that campfire or cave dwelling before Gutenberg ever dreamed up his contraption.

Hearing a great narrator bring a terrific story to your ears has no rival. It allows you to immerse yourself in that world with no obligation to read the words, find your reading glasses, or turn pages. You can just enjoy the story being read to you by another human being.

It may not seem like there is much of a difference between reading a book and listening to one. And in the mundane sense, there isn’t; both offer a way to ingest the story. But audiobooks give you something more: the ancient human connection to the spoken word and the human soul. Your human soul.

And that is done through the narrator, the storyteller. Without them, it’s just a story.

Happy listening!