I’m not a fan of brick and mortar bookstores. It isn’t the fact that they have turned into Starbucks locations or music stores. No, it is just too hard to find anything worthwhile in a bookstore these days! Now, Amazon has given me one more reason to avoid them all together.

Lifehacker profiled a new service from Amazon today called TextBuyIt.

Essentially, it is a service that allows you to send a text message to Amazon with a book’s title, author or ISBN code and purchase said book over the phone. After initiating the txt, you will receive a response that has available options. When you’re ready to “check out” you will actually receive a phone call from an automated system for your confirmation.

Pretty cool!

Okay though, is it overkill? Perhaps.

I couldn’t see buying a book using this type of system. Given that I have an iPhone I’d probably use that interface, or wait until I got home. Still, I love to hear about this kind of innovation. I was thinking that something along these lines, coupled with Twitter, could create an interesting dynamic.

I do a lot of keyword tracking on Twitter. For example, I track the word “psp” to see what gamers are talking about and playing. Hypothetically, if I didn’t have my iPhone and a gamer was talking about a new game, or perhaps a sale on a game that was only available for X amount of time, or an online-only sale, it would make ordering from Amazon through the TextBuyIt service useful.

Awhile back while visiting Google, I distinctly remember some of the engineers I was meeting with talk about their desires to put comparison shopping tools in the hand of mobile users. If I was driving around town and I wanted to find the closest place to my physical location that was selling a bbq grill (for example) I would be able to find that from my phone.

This service from Amazon doesn’t quite have that kind of reach - but it certainly seem tech companies are moving in that direction.