I could not find much data but it seems that the finale of Games of thrones had 19 million viewers [1], while the books sold 90 million copies [2]. Since I guess the latter are cumulative over all the five books, it looks like books and series have a similar performance.

Looking at something similar, the Lord of the Rings had around 80-90 million viewers (very rough estimation from the global box office [3]) while the book sold 150 million copies [4], so the books seem to have fared better.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Game_of_Thrones_episod...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Song_of_Ice_and_Fire#cite_no...

[3] - https://www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt0120737/?ref_=bo_tt_ta...

[4] - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-arts-tolkien-novel-idUSL1...

While this data is interesting, it doesn't say how many people watched or read something, only those who paid to watch/read something, which is very different.

I've purchased all of the books you've mentioned, but watched the films/series via other means that won't show up in the statistics, and I'm not alone in doing so or vice-versa.

Books like Lord of the Rings gets passed through generations and loaned around as well, so I'm sure the number of people who've read LotR is a lot higher than the number of people who bought the books.

Not to mention libraries.

not to dispute your point, but netflix is a library

Uh, no? A library lends out books/media to people at no cost. How is Netflix, a publicly traded for-profit company, anything like a non-profit, usually government-owned library?

Being a library has nothing to do with being non-profit or government-run.

The first libraries were private. Sometimes they were opened to fee-paying members. Netflix is a library.

Public libraries are the "new" thing. But not the only thing.

Well other than the cost its essentially the same experience for the user

Again, no. Try writing Netflix and ask if they can add something to their "library", they won't. Libraries adds stuff based on user requests all the time, and even have 3rd party loans so you can borrow books from another library via the one you have access to.

All Netflix cares about is profits. All libraries care about is sharing. They are two very different entities except for the fact that they deal with media. They are more different than they are similar.

you pay a (usually) flat fee and get to borrow (no change of ownership) stuff.

The library costs you money too, in the form of taxes. At least Netflix only charges its actual users. I'm forced to pay for the two public libraries in my town even though I've never been in them.

Your taxes also maintain roads you never drive on. And yet you still benefit because the trucks that supply your grocery store or the plumber coming to fix your sink might use those roads. That’s the point of taxes: we all pay in, and we all reap the rewards.

Are you really having issues with paying extra taxes in order to help people afford reading more books and gaining knowledge for themselves?

Capitalism has really fucked us up if this is a common sentiment.

The cost of civilization. It appears lost of many.

Fortunately, those whom civilisation just doesn't rub off onto are still farily easy to spot.

Sure, it meets the technical definition, but not the colloquial usage of the word. No one says let's check out the library and means Netflix. You may hear the “Netflix library” mentioned from time to time, but it has a different connotation as far as use.

> I could not find much data but it seems that the finale of Games of thrones had 19 million viewers [1]

Umm isn't that just on the date it airs? That's like comparing it to the people who read the book in the first month (year?).

There is no way as many people read the books as saw the tv show. I would bet it's at least one order of magnitude difference, if not possibly more.

Since your premise is that there is no way to know, your speculation is then as (in)valid as any other.

On the contrary, edanm's premise is that the number of viewers cited in the parent comment was the number of viewers on the day of release, and the number of book sales mentioned was cumulative. If that premise holds, then probabilistically speaking it'd be very safe to say that more people have consumed the visual media than the literary media.

Not sure, maybe I'm odd but I only ever read the books.

> the finale of Games of thrones had 19 million viewers [1], while the books sold 90 million copies [2]

Isn't this viewers in one country (USA), versus books sold worldwide?

> Looking at something similar, the Lord of the Rings had around 80-90 million viewers (very rough estimation from the global box office [3]) while the book sold 150 million copies [4], so the books seem to have fared better.

Viewerships in Box-Office are limited to a specific timeframe and location. They do not include television, private viewing on streaming-services/DVD/etc., later screenings in cinemas around the world. And the movies only exist for 20 years, while the booksales are from 3x that timeframe.

And finally, those are exceptional successful books and franchises. What about an average book? How many people have seen Forest Gump and how many actually read the book even decades later after the initial hype?

19 million counted legal viewers. Myself and everyone I know just torrented it.

Books tap directly into the imagination in a way that films (very) rarely do.

The most amazing special effects in the world can't match my imagination for fidelity and if they did, they'd still not be mine.

I've noticed that the book to TV/movies I like aren't because they are good adaptations so much as they are close to what I imagined.

It's rare that happens but when it does it makes the TV show a deeply enjoyable, Season 1 of Altered Carbon and all the seasons of The Expanse did/do it but not much else in the last 5 years has.

If you see Dune in a theatre with good enough sound and screen (ex. IMAX), it’s an incredible experience in a way a book could not be. Not saying it’s “better”, it’s just different in a fundamentally incomparable way.

The movie is missing so much of the detail that made the book great, though. I agree, incomparable, really.

IMO, the best movies are NOT adaptations.

The best adaptations are short stories, like Predestination, from All you zombies. They also didn't meddle with the logic there, since the writers already found it perfect.

Yeah, it's a lot easier to do a faithful 100-minute adaptation of a 50-page story than a 300-page book.

The Mist comes to mind, a novella originally IIRC

I had read and loved The Expanse. I also loved it on tv. Lord of the Ring. Hmmm.

Some of us don't manufacture alternate visual realities in our heads.

But I think that's the point. In a book you don't "see" the visual effects, you just know that they happened.

When you watch a movie, your eyes and ears has to collect the information, and some part of your brain has to turn that into a log of events. You have to do a lot of work to do to keep up with whats going on.

When you are reading, you don't need to do all that work, the author has already decided what is important.

I think the two mediums aren't really comparable, they both just happen to be good ways to tell stories.

After how it ended I’d argue that they are way less popular now than any of the books

It's kind of astounding how rapidly the series has disappeared from the mainstream. Couldn't have bungled it up worse had they tried.

Not that I loved how it landed I think it’s more that GoT was about as close as we get to a cultural touchstone as you get these days. Which is a far smaller audience than prime time used to be. A hit show on HBO would probably be canceled on network TV with similar audience numbers.

But the moment is over and now it’s just another show in a vast universe of streaming options.

I think that happens to just about all Dramatic shows. Same for Mad Men, Breaking Bad and other popular shows. Without the scarcity of yore, we have a constant buffet of alternatives, so who has time to rewatch (or catch up). In contrast, The Office, Friends and Seinfeld are apparently still bringing people back, perhaps because it is comforting to spend time with those characters and the viewer doesn’t need to make a big commitment.

its like Disney Star Wars - even if you like star wars, knowing how badly it's been bungled makes putting the time into watching it again or being excited about it seem like waste of effort. The payoff isn't there.

They recently started shooting the prequel... in my home town! I hope it's good, but in any case my friends and I will watch it for the lulz.

The books took one person a lifetime to create. The series took billions of dollars and hundreds of lifetimes, even though the story was already there. The books were extremely effective.

How expensive was it to produce the movies compared to the books? What was the ROI as a ratio?