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They don't do this because the information isn't readily available and there's no call for it. It may be easy to find run times for movies and music, but few people pay much attention to these, the only real exception being if a movie is unusually long. Consumers generally don't need down-to-the-minute information about how long things take; if I'm book shopping, forget even page counts, how thick the book is is usually a close enough approximation. Publishers know this, too, so they will often make the kind of formatting decisions you mentioned above with that in mind, whether to add extra bulk to a slim volume or condense a longer work down so it doesn't look too intimidating.
But suppose they did start publishing word counts. What of it? If a book says that it contains 100,000 words it means absolutely nothing to me the way it does if an albums says it's 38 minutes long. I vaguely remember learning in 9th grade that a novel was anything longer than 60,000 words, but I couldn't tell you how long most novels actually are. And I couldn't translate this into how long it will take to read because I have no idea how fast I read, other than that I read faster than most people, though even then I'm sure there's variation based on how tired I am, how engaged I am with the material, etc.
Complicating this even further is the fact that people rarely read an entire book in one sitting. In judging how "long" a book will take to read I'm usually thinking more in terms of days or weeks than in hours or minutes. If a movie is listed at two hours I can say easily that if I start watching it at 8 pm I'll finish watching it at 10 and plan my evening accordingly. If a book says it's 90,000 words then I have to divide that by my average reading speed to get the total time in minutes, then divide that by 60 to get hours and an approximation of minutes, then figure out how much time per day I anticipate having to dedicate to reading, and only then can I figure out how long it will take to finish it. Most people aren't doing this calculation.
And word count isn't as cut and dried as running time. For most fiction, there isn't much superfluous text, but in nonfiction this gets sticky, since a lot of the material included isn't really intended to be "read", per se. Do you include the preface and foreward? Probably. The acknowledgements? Most people skip these but the author wants you to read them. Appendixes? Depends on what's in them; is it supplementary text or a collection of facts and figures? Call that a maybe. Footnotes? Depends on whether they're explanatory or bibliographic, though many are a combination of both. The index? Almost certainly not. We can quibble over where to draw the line, but the word count the publisher is using includes all of the above, because they have to print all of it regardless. And then there's the variation on how different software programs count words. So the same book could have a huge variation depending on whether they're using the count from the manuscript as submitted in Word (the stingiest program) or the InDesign count for the entire published text, that counts every numeral in the index as a separate word. This could be solved by industry standardization, by why develop such a standard when there's simply no call for it?
I think I did a good job in my post outlining the fact that the information is readily available. Certainly for any novel which has been digitised, which is essentially every book which has been published this century (including reprints of older books).
I disagree. Netflix has a specific category called ninety minute movies. The topic of the "ideal" length for a movie recurs quite often in film discussions (e.g., e.g.).
Sure, but there's no reason they couldn't be. How Long to Beat? has tens of thousands of users logging how long it took them to complete a particular video game. This is helpful, because a large "wisdom of crowds" effect gives you a better idea of how long a game will take you to finish than the marketing hype which will make true-but-misleading claims like "50 hours of gameplay". Unlike books, there's no single objective answer to the question "how long is this video game?"; like books, there's enormous variability from person to person in how long it takes one to get from the start to the end. Why couldn't there be a website called How Long to Read? (or better yet, some extra fields in Goodreads) which lists the objective word count of a book (optionally excluding references, appendices etc. for non-fiction, much like How Long to Beat? segregates "main story" playthroughs from "completionist" playthroughs), along with user records of how long it took them to finish the book? I think this would be a fascinating and useful resource. Imagine if you're trying to plan for your holiday, so you pack one massive doorstopper which you expect to last you the full two weeks - and it's so absorbing you breeze through the whole thing in three days, leaving you with nothing to read for the rest of your holiday. If you knew in advance that most people breeze through the book in a few hours in spite of its intimidating length, you could have planned accordingly and brought one or more additional books.
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