Is a Picture worth a 1000 words?

I recently watched Peter Jacksons's Hobbit, which has been shot in 48 fps. That means that the 170 minute long movie uses nearly 489,000 frames. And this is only the first part of a trilogy. At this rate, the full series will easily use up more than 1 million frames. 

Now, the entire book is only 96,000 odd words, i.e., the word count in the entire book is less than the number of pictures/frames used in the 1st movie. And many would still prefer to read the book over watching the movie. 

Clearly, all pictures are not worth 1000 words, especially if the words are written by JRRT.