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I've gotten rid of most of my pbooks because I rarely reread fiction. I've kept things I'm likely to reread, things I loved so much that I would like to have them on hand to lend to people and reference/technical books. I, however, am married to a packrat. In addition, he actually does reread many books so he has a good reason for hanging on to quite a few of them. We got to the point that our shelves were beyond full. The shelves with paperbacks had them stacked two rows high and two rows deep. You couldn't find anything and we still had books in stacks that we couldn't squeeze on the shelves. Everywhere we could fit a bookshelf, has a bookshelf. At this point I convinced him to at least get rid of the books he didn't like. It helped that I also calculated for him the cost in square footage devoted to book storage. We have now started boxing and cataloging stuff that we are less likely to need in the immediate future. I just have to accept that we're opposites in some things. This is one of them. He has an emotional attachment to the paper books as objects. I don't. I prefer reading on a device. I view them as dustcatchers. I hate clutter and would rather have all my books in electronic form except for things that are best on paper, like art books.
You could actually still use a boxing method as long as you kept the stuff you access fairly frequently somewhere easy like slide-out bins under the bed, as someone else mentioned. The rest could go in banker boxes in the closets. Then you can just have a small number of bookshelves for the current reads and stuff you know you want all the time. Are you attached to the DVD packaging? We saved a lot of space there by dumping the cases and putting them all in binders. My husband has a fairly large collection and he was able to fit it in three big binders. I actually don't have any DVDs. Just like I rarely reread novels, I rarely watch the same movie or show more than once.
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