if book publishers spent the same amount of money movie publishers spend on marketing a single blockbuster movie (50% of the budget, i.e. billions of dollars) books would sell a lot more too.
Don't be fooled by the raw numbers, look at the big picture.
Anyway that's not a fair comparison, you don't need special hardware to read books, you already have it installed by the OEM, they are called eyes.
But in all fairness books help to sell a lot of devices too
By 2018 Amazon reported selling close to 90 million e-readers. By 2022 the number of Kindle devices sold globally was over 150 million. By 2027, Statista projects the number of e-reader users to grow to 1.2 billion
The problem is e-readers are very reliable, so people don't buy them new every 6 months.
Which is also why people buy books, they are very reliable and last for centuries, without consuming a single drop of energy.
Books are sold in the millions per week and e-books in the hundreds of thousands.
