How many people watched game of thrones? How many people read all of the published books in a song of ice and fire? The book might be better but movies and TV are a lot more popular.
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...
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.
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.
Capitalism has really fucked us up if this is a common sentiment.
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.
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.
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?
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.
IMO, the best movies are NOT adaptations.
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.
But the moment is over and now it’s just another show in a vast universe of streaming options.