My feeling is if you never read the books its likely going to seem like a nice fantasy series and you likely won’t miss the inconsistency due to some changes but you might if your a detailed oriented person although they skip stuff to the point were it might be noticed. Like all of a sudden folks are together or in a place and they don’t go through how they got there. I do think having read the books makes it more of an issue but there is a guy who said he read the books through twice (no mean feet as there are a lot of them and each one is like a dictionary in size) and still likes it so I guess to each his own. That further being said my wife does not like it and she never read any of the books and loved the lord of the rings (which she had also never read). She won’t even watch it with me after season one although I don’t really encourage it since I watch and then complain about it to her.