Unless otherwise stated, my reviews are based on a full reading of the work in question. Reviews of encyclopedias, dictionaries and other reference works are based on selective reading and general use, usually over a period of a year or more; reviews of periodicals are based on at least a year's issues.
I have chosen to work part-time (20 hours a week) so I have more time for other activities, reading and reviewing among them. I watch almost no television and listen to little music.
I've written a brief history of ten years writing book reviews.
None. Well, no formal ones that are relevant to most of my reading - I have an BSc (hons) in computer science, with mathematics and physics majors. More about me can be found on my home page.
I won't be giving up my day job anytime soon, but income from my web sites covers my hosting costs and my book buying.
If you have some really spectacular proposal I might be open to it, but I haven't run advertising on this site and am not really keen on the idea.
My motivations for writing reviews are various and what I read depends very much on what grabs my fancy when browsing bookshops or publishers' catalogues. I do like being able to obtain review copies of books from (some) publishers, but I only read and review the books that I want to.
As well as being published on this web site, my reviews are posted to appropriate mailing lists and Usenet newsgroups; a few have appeared in print journals. An RSS headline feed is available at http://dannyreviews.com/rss.xml
In 2002 this site saw 2.4 million page views by perhaps 900 000 people (excluding robots and other automated accesses as far as is possible). My two mailing lists have about 1300 subscribers between them.
My reviews are archived by the National Library of Australia as part of Pandora.
I maintain a separate page of book review sites and sources.
I design web sites to communicate as effectively as possible, not to look glitzy, and on a site like this text is much more important than images. The complete omission of images was an accident originally, but is now deliberate - a demonstration that an effective image-free site is possible.
If you have any suggestions for improving the usability or effectiveness of this site, please let me know.
My reviews were distributed by ftp and email before they were ever available on the web and the email versions are still the "base", with the web versions and indices generated from them by Python scripts. (These are pretty ugly and have lots of stuff hard-coded, but if you want it I will send you the source code; I am an ardent free software advocate.) The key to this is the the machine-readable bibliographic information at the end of each review, in slightly modified "refer" format.
Many people have contributed to my book reviews and this web site over the years. Notable design and layout advice has come from settext guru Ian Feldman and hypertext expert Jorn Barger, a fellow proponent of "content-centred web design". Mark Lauer has corrected (too) many spelling and grammar mistakes. And my most reliable intellectual critic has been Cameron Laird, who has a knack for suggesting small but effective additions.
This site doesn't use cookies or images. I collect standard server logs, but use them only to track trends and find interesting referring pages.
I don't have a guestbook on this site, but you email is always welcome and you can leave public comments on my Facebook page Danny Yee's Book Reviews or via Twitter.