WITD - Which was better?

I have found that often times the book is not always better than the movie. For example, the Lord of the Rings trilogy were books before they were made into movies. The Lord of the Rings surpassed expectations for how good the visual representation of all the people and places would be as well as how closely the story-line line would be followed and brought tot life. For this trilogy specifically, the hardest thing from transitioning from a book to a movie was the visual aspect. The Lord of the Rings features many extravagant castles, mountains, rivers, and forests that were probably very hard to create in a real world environment. Also, many of the characters in the books were not of the human race. Elves, dwarfs, tree spirits, wraiths, goblins, and many others roamed the lands in the book trilogy. Replicating these people with human actors, since obviously no non-human races like these appear in real life, would have proved to be quite difficult.