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.