Average book length

Some statistics are useful, and some are not. I don't know if this one is useful, but it's kind of fun:

The average book has 64,500 words.

I don't know exactly what I'd do with this in class, but it seems like an interesting opportunity to discuss why we use different statistical measures to describe data, and to get kids thinking about which measures feel useful in which situations. Is mean really the right measure of central tendency for this statistic? Is comparing a measure of central tendency even useful? Why do we care?

There also might be something (less exciting, more practice-y) about using all the stats for each book to work backwards to calculate the standard deviation. That also raises the question of whether mean and standard deviation are really the right descriptors. I am very curious whether word length is a normal distribution. It might depend on what genres of books you include (children's books seem like the have the potential to skew the data).

What other statistical questions might kids generate? How could they use info about the books they're reading in English class to do some further exploration?