Some people are like that, though: they've never heard of something, but then they see an adaptation they like and then they buy all the books, in this case five of them. (Or all four of them.
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I'm not the world's greatest consumer, and I have been impervious to adverts for four decades or more, but this is near enough what I did when I "saw" how good the books were; in my case I saw the recommendations for the series on this site, started reading the first and was hooked, to the extent of buying the other four (as ASOS comes as two paperbacks).
And given the pace of TV production, some folk won't want to wait until Series Five (due no earlier than 2015, if at all) and so they'll "cheat" by reading the books. (You know, I've heard it said that even people who've only seen the books have, over the last decade or so, become a tiny bit impatient with the slow arrival of the later books. Who'd've thunk it?)[/QUOTE]
Using the Harry Potter series as a template, one can probably infer a few things about how consumers of a book series being adapted to film/television will behave.
I don't have hard numbers, but based on everything I read about each new HP release, there weren't a lot of people wanting to see the next movie before they would buy the current book. I also think that the total number of people reading the HP series grew with the release of each book, although I wouldn't call that a causal relationship. For whatever reason, the HP fanbase grew as each book was released, maybe because of an ever growing number of kids learning to read and wanting to join in on the fun that the older kids were having. In the case of ASOIAF, there will be a few differences, but enough similarities to make a prediction (I think). First, the viewership of HBO is far less than the number of people that would potentially go to see a movie. of those who actually do have HBO, it's hard to know how many would watch the pilot. On the other hand, there will be people who don't have HBO who will get it either to see the pilot, but more likely to watch the series if it is picked up. This happened with The Sopranos btw.
I guess I've been rambling, so to summarize, probably no one will wait to see new seasons of the HBO series before reading the books. The HBO series will serve to add people who never read the books, but I think the sales of the books will be fairly independent of how the series does.
