I'm not much for Facebook, either.
That said, we all sound like old men sitting around saying,
" I remember when the Internet meant BBS and Usenet.There was none of this WWW or GUI frippery, and people typed commands into a terminal window, the way God intended." (waves cane)
There are 800M Facebook users and rising. For quite a few people, especially the young, Facebook IS the Internet.The great thing about FB, from a marketing standpoint, is the ease with which you can share content and recommendations. If I download a sample and "Like" it, everyone of my Friends instantly knows it.Now I don't have many Facebook friends, but my teenage daughter in law has 1,035.
It makes sense for publishers and authors to use it (and Twitter) as a marketing tool. It may make sense to use it as a sales channel. Through a Facebook app, the publisher/author could arrange to sell a book directly to me with one click, using my Facebook credentials. Once the sale goes through, my friends get updated and creates more buzz and additional sales. What's in it for Facebook? A cut of the sales.Facebook could become the Facebookstore.
Setting up the app though is the easy part. What about customer service? Neither FB or the publishers have a background in that. That's a huge hill that needs to beclimbed before FB could be a viable sales channel.