Terry Teachout in the Wall Street Journal on e-books:
Yes, I miss the bookstores of my youth, and I’m sure I’ll miss the handsomely bound volumes that fill the shelves in my apartment as well (though I won’t miss dusting them, or toting them around by the half-dozen whenever I go on vacation). The printed book is a beautiful object, “elegant” in both the aesthetic and mathematical senses of the word, and its invention was a pivotal moment in the history of Western culture. But it is also a technology — a means, not an end. Like all technologies, it has a finite life span, and its time is almost up.
M. Night Shyamalan (“The Sixth Sense,” “Signs”), at an exhibitor convention in October, railed against the day-and-date strategy, telling theater owners, “If this thing happens, you know the majority of your theaters are closing. It’s going to crush you guys.” Shyamalan also said he objected to the plan as an artist. “When I sit down next to you in a movie theater . . . we become part of a collective soul,” he said. “That’s the magic in the movies.”
Soderbergh, obviously, doesn’t share Shyamalan’s anxieties. “If he doesn’t want to do it, then he doesn’t have to do it,” Soderbergh says. “I know Night and we’ve talked about this, and he was very upfront about saying, ‘You’re killing the business, why are you doing this?’ And I don’t see it that way. I really don’t care how people see my movies, as long as they see them. I’m just not interested in controlling how somebody experiences one of my films.”
UPDATE: Follow-up comments from Teachout on e-books and reader responses to the Post on day-and-date.