Obsolete furniture

Some say good furniture is timeless. But that was before technology started changing at warp speed. I'm thinking about the cherry TV armoire now languishing in my basement bedroom.

Back in the early '90s, when I moved into my previous house, the armoire was the first piece of furniture I bought. It seemed absolutely necessary at the time. The house was built in the 1920s, pre-TV, and the wall in the family room where the TV needed to go was a focal point, visible as soon as you entered the house.

I looked long and hard to find the perfect armoire, one that complemented my woodwork and the style of my house without busting my budget. But when I moved to a newer house a few years later, that essential armoire was suddenly useless.

The new house was built in 1990, and the family room came with a wood built-in, obviously designed to accommodate a TV. It's square and deep, and perfectly fits my current TV, which is big and old. But once my TV stops working, that built-in will become obsolete. Today's TVs are wider and flatter and will never fit in that space. Meanwhile, it's been 14 years, and the armoire is still banished to the basement and covered with dust.

At least it has company -- the tall bookshelf I bought when I moved into my first apartment. I had nothing but an old bed and a chair when I set up housekeeping in Buffalo, Minn., eager to start my first newspaper job. I found a $50 sofa at a garage sale, but I splurged on a brand-new bookcase at Dayton's. That's how important my books were to me. A bookworm as a child, an English major as a college student, I had a LOT of books. I have even more now. But my house has built-in bookshelves, making free-standing book furniture much less important.

I still love books, but I'm buying a lot fewer of them, now that I can download them on my Kindle. And that makes me wonder about the future of books and bookshelves and home libraries. We'll still be reading, obviously. But we'll need a lot less space for our reading materials.

What do you think? Will rooms and furniture designed for books still be around in 50 years? How do you store reading materials at your home? And what are you doing with your old TV armoire?