Do you read a novel in one sitting?
Albums (especially concept albums) and movies are created and meant to be appreciated in one sitting. Now, you can watch or listen to these things in chunks, but it surely takes away some of the magic. The novel analogy doesn't work because you can pause between chapters, reading a novel is like watching a TV series. You're not going to watch 6 seasons on Lost in one sitting (it would take you over 100 hours to do so anyway).
Luckily, Neal Morse's
Testimony and
Testimony 2 albums are divided into 8 "Parts", ranging from 10-41 minutes long, which, to me, are kind of like Chapters. Being an auto-biographical concept album, each Part is sort of a Chapter in Neal's story, so if one really wanted to, they could listen to Parts 1 and 2 (Disc 1 of T1) in one sitting, pause for a time, then coming back and listen to the next 3 parts.
Comparing albums with movies is difficult, since it has always been easy to fit films into a single-piece medium - for a long time, films would be long (or short) enough to fit into one cassette or laserdisc or dvd or blu-ray. Rarely do films exceed the capacity of a single-piece format.
Albums, however, have had a long history of exceeding the given format of the time - double albums go a long way back, mostly because the format back then (vinyl), only allowed for single albums up to 40-50 minutes in length. Now, in the age of CDs, albums can be double that length and still fit into a single piece, so I think the idea that being able to listen to an album NOW in a single sitting can be a bit tedious, whether or not it's a Double CD.
I agree, films are meant to be viewed in single sittings, but I can't expect all artists to believe that for albums, especially long double albums like The Flower Kings'
Unfold The Future. And now that we're in the digital age, a lot of fans only listen to music casually, on their iPods, when they typically are doing other tasks. It's not a sit-down-and-pay-full-attention ritual like fans did way back in the day when they unwrapped their vinyl's double-gatefold cover, slipped the vinyl on their turntables and turned down the lights.
-Marc.