Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
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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