Novelizations are actually kind of cool, because often times they will be based on an earlier draft of the screenplay than the one used for the final movie, so one can find out what was originally going to be different in a movie. For instance, in the novelization of Back to the Future, Marty actually hides the Delorean inside the garage of what will be his house in the future, rather than behind a billboard. And he actually has the push the Delorean all the way to Doc Brown's house in order to fully convince him that he's telling the truth about being a time traveler. I actually thought these differences were pretty interesting.
In the novelization of The Karate Kid, the scene where Daniel visits the arcade with his girlfriend comes directly before the day when he finds out that Miyagi has been teaching him karate all along, whereas this scene comes much earlier in the final movie. Also, the beginning scene of Karate Kid 2, where Miyagi beats up the evil karate teacher, was originally intended to be the ending of the first film, and the novelization includes it. These are things that I never would have found out had I never read the novelizations.
What does get kind of annoying is when there are novelizations of movies that are already based on books. I thought the whole point of a novelization was so that people had a book version of a story that they could read. And if the movie is already based on a book, why can't people just read that one? I only advocate books based on movies based on books if the movie is different enough from the original book that it becomes a different story.
All in all, I think novelizations of movies still have quite a bit of merit among collectors.
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