I see some stories being very well suited to a shorter format, but others completely unsuited to it. I think I see the dividing line is how important the characters' developments are to properly telling the story.
For example,
Minority Report doesn't really go into character development all that much, the characters are largely the same at the beginning as the end. It's a good ride, but it doesn't give the reader all that much to think about as far as how the characters react to the situation. The "thinking" it induces in the reader is more on how humanity as a whole deals with the concepts it covers, rather than how the characters work their ways through them. This is what makes them Philip K. Dick's stories so great for movie adaptations, while things like the
Harry Potter books (especially the later ones) seem rushed as movies.
On the other hand, a classic "coming of age" story has a much harder time cramming itself into so short a span without flattening the characters. And how much does a character really come of age if he never develops? Is a character really a character if the reader doesn't
care about him?
I used to love the
Xanth novels, but somewhere around #13, the author seemed to lose track of the characters somehow. He got so caught up in telling the story and cramming in as many puns as possible that he forgot to tell the story of the
characters. That's the reason I stopped reading them. Frankly, I kept reading them a lot longer than I should have out of past love for the series.
So while I agree that short, efficient books can tell some stories exceedingly well, there are some that simply need a larger canvas to paint their pictures on. Does any story really
need 13 several-hundred-page-long volumes to do it justice? Well, that's a different question, now isn't it?
This is kind of a different parsing of the question "Book or Movie" to my mind. Some stories make good movies, others don't, the length available in the format for presenting the story is the main dividing line. Does that mean that books that don't make good movies aren't good books? I certainly don't think so, and I don't think that books that won't cram into less than 100 pages are necessarily bad ones either.
