The hobbit contains a ton less information than the Lord of the Rings. Now there's a lot more crud in the Lord of the Rings (screw the Songs) but in terms of scope, the Hobbit is like the original 13 colonies, and the LOTR is like the whole US. The hobbit involves 4 primary locations, Shire, Misty Mountains, Mirkwood, and the Lonely Mountain. The Hobbit paces itself better because the Hobbit is a children's book while LOTR is an adult's book.
Hobbit is relatively simple, with only about 20 or so important characters while Lord of the Rings have countless important characters. The movie glossed over some unimportant parts and some incredibly important parts as well, some for understandable purposes (like having the Army of the Undead end the Battle for Pelanor fields to make it faster) other things that I hate are the entire absence of the importance of things that are super important in the book like the Gifts of Galadriel, also makes the hobbits seem like children for most of the movies (For example, Aragorn built the fire on Weathertop and Boromir threw the stones into the lake outisde of Moria), and many more things. There's a ton of awesome stuff in the movies that's left out of the books that LOTR nerds love. I would recommend reading the books. They may take some time to get into and honestly you could probably skip the Songs, but just read it and I think you'll love it.
