Book Review Travels at the Speed of Light

Reader Views published Susan Violante’s review of ClanDonnell this week and it is already around the world.

I am old enough to remember the world before there was an internet. And I am not young enough to lack awe at the world wide web.

Before I had a chance to read the book review, it was already at the Seattle Post Intelligencer. This used to be a print newspaper, with a history back to 1863. That was decades before Washington became a state. In 2009, the paper gave up trying to compete with the internet and became an internet-only newspaper. It calls itself an online newspaper, but since no paper is involved, this seems a bit of an oxymoron.

But Seattle PI (as it is locally known) does provide daily news and provides all of the services newspapers have always provided. It simply doesn’t own printing presses anymore and doesn’t deliver the news to your doorstep.

Fortunately, it does review books and it did review ClanDonnell.

In the time it took the book review to reach Seattle, it also crossed three oceans and landed in four other continents.

The review reached NewsNow in the United Kingdom. NewsNow bills itself as the UK’s #1 news portal. I have no reason to doubt the claim. Proof that it is #1, at least to us, is its review of ClanDonnell.

EZY Media and EZY Publishing in Australia provide a variety of services to newspapers, magazines, websites, and others, as well as an array of services to authors. One of these services, evidently, is to publish a review of ClanDonnell.

I think the internet signal bounced off Australia and landed in India. Or the book review reached India some other way, I don’t know. Veooz is a new company from India which somehow does something and magically takes information from one source and publish it somewhere else.

Veooz describes itself this way: “Veooz is a real time, auto-curated source of news & information extracted via natural language processing of massive amounts of information shared across a wide range of social networks, news sources and blogs.”

I think I know what that sentence means, but I’m not sure. But whatever it means, Veooz picked up the book review from Seattle PI and reposted it as Veooz News! I’d tell you how to find the review on Veooz but I haven’t figured out its search function yet.

World News Network is an internet news source which grabs millions of pages of items from sources around the world, and reposts them on WN.com. The network claims it has one million different viewers per day.

World News Network has offices in London and Helsinki in Europe; New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles in North America; Hong Kong in Asia; Sydney in Australia; and Rio de Janeiro in South America. That’s five continents by my count.

The neatest thing about World News Network is that with all of the bits of information gathered, and with all of the important news going on in the world, it chose to run the book review of ClanDonnell!

A book review of ClanDonnell is now available from all of earth’s continents. I’m not counting Antarctica, because I’m pretty sure penguins can’t read.