Like Jad Abumrad said, telling stories orally without the benefit of visuals is ancient. Before we had theater and acted out stories, before we painted on the walls of caves to help tell our tales, we could only speak them, give them words, explain what we meant without being able to show. Rarely have we told stories without sound. Aside from paintings (which usually need cultural context for the story to be understood), the only medium I can think of is silent movies. Even then, there was musical accompaniment and words (visual representations of audible sounds) were written on the screen. Books are just words, just a collection of audible…