I’ve been having a lot of fun with the Translucid Bookshelf. Even if I’m the only one who reads the reviews, the process of writing them — beginning with reading the book with the end goal of writing the review in mind — has been an engaging one, which makes it worthwhile.

Sometime today or tomorrow I’ll have a review of a book called Knockout Entrepreneur by boxer and entrepreneur George Foreman posted.

But I also wanted to talk a bit about how I got the book. I got pointed to a site called BookSneeze a few weeks ago. BookSneeze is operated by Thomas Nelson, a privately-held Christian publishing company. Nelson CEO Michael Hyatt is an active blogger – check him out at his blog Leading with Purpose – and apparently he brought the idea of a blogger outreach program to the company.

The BookSneeze program is a pretty simple one. You browse through the available books; Nelson sends you one book at a time that you’re interested in; you agree to post a review on your blog, and on a commercial book site, such as Amazon. Then you can choose what you want to do with the book.

One other neat feature of the program: my chosen book (I’m not sure if all their books are in this program or not) is part of NelsonFree. That means that when you buy the book, you get access to it in audio format (MP3) and in e-book format as well.

I’m not a Christian — in fact, I’m not religious at all; I’m an atheist. And the number of books that Nelson offers that I’ll be interested in will likely be pretty low. Their catalog of available books includes “Mom’s Bible” and Facing Your Giants: The God Who Made a Miracle Out of David Stands Ready to Make One Out of You. I’m not likely to grab either of those.

But even if I rarely take advantage of the program, I did want to point out that it’s amazingly well done. Crisply designed, easy to use, and so far seamless. I think a lot of publishers might benefit from a similar one. After all, authors have figured it out — just ask Andy Nulman or Joe Jaffe. And even bookstores are using new media in interesting ways.

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