DALTON TANONAKA, CNN ANCHOR: The invention of the printing press helped revolutionize the word. New technology promises to do the same for at least the publishing industry, as David George reports.</s>ROBERT MCCORMACH, 1STBOOKS.COM: This industry is going to grow as a whole, similar to many other industries where technology started to fringe upon the traditional industry.</s>GEORGE: But far from feeling infringed upon, old-line publishers are joining the online crowd. Barns and Nobles, CNN parent company AOL-Timer Warner, and Random House among the publishing giants driving the digital revolution.</s>MARY BAHR, ATRANDOM.COM: What we want to do is be a part of creating a market for electronic books.</s>GEORGE: Random House is the world's largest English-language publisher. It's new e-book division offers more than 300 titles in both paper and audio format. In contrast, four-year old Indiana-based 1stbooks.com library, publishing books from over 7,000, most of them unknown, because e-books is pay to play. The company charges authors $400 to be published digitally, another $200 for paperback. Unlike so called "vanity presses" however, First Book prints only what sells and pays royalties. It expects to distribute a half million books this year, most of them works that might not even be produced by big name publishers.</s>MCCORMACK: So you might have an absolutely outstanding book whose market is not large enough for traditional publishes to take a chance on.</s>GEORGE: Random House's Mary Bahr stresses electronic publishing, by eliminating costly press runs, will enable even the biggest authors to serve what she calls "the deep audience," customers for works which will never become best sellers.</s>BAHR: So that we can publish into the deep corners and find books that are interesting to a specific community, and feel confident that we can reach them and promote the book properly.</s>GEORGE: So e-books are changing the way should some of us read books. They're changing the range of books available to read even more. David George, CNN, New York.
New Technology Promises to Revolutionize Publishing Industry