Google announced the ability to share info about books from Google Books in circles on Google+ today. This should greatly help Google promote its e-book platform, particularly if Google+ continues the strong growth it has seen in its early days.

“Let’s say you are reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and you’d like your friends to read it with you (or you have a witty comment to let loose),” says Google Books Product Manager Abe Murray. “Simply click on the Google+ Share box on the About the Book page or in a Google Books preview, enter your message, then select which circles you’d like to share details about the book with, and click ‘share’.”

When you share book info on Google+ it displays the book’s cover, the description, and title, which links back to the About the Book page on Google Books. It’s basically like sharing any other link.

“You can also simply paste the About the Book or Google Books preview URL into your Google+ Share box,” says Murray. “This will show the cover and book details, helping your friends know exactly what you’re sharing with them. While you’re sharing books, you can also +1 them, and the titles will appear in your profile on the +1 tab.”

Google pitches the concept as a way to share your favorite books with “literary circles”. To me it looks like just a way to share a link to a book. For those in book clubs in which the members all have Google+ profiles, this will probably be helpful.

The visibility of all of this should be greatly helped by Google’s initiative to get authors of web content using its authorship markup, which effectively puts authors’ profiles in greater view in search results. This should apply to book reviews.

Google recently announced that it is teaming up with Pottermore, JK Rowling’s new site, which will open up this fall to provide eBook services. The two are partnering to integrate Pottermore with various Google products and APIs. The Harry Potter book series will launch in eBook form on Pottermore.com in October, and they’ll also become available through the Google eBooks platform. I’m guessing these will be make a lot of appearances on Google+.