The publishing industry is likely to undergo profound changes in business practices
over the next decade. It is becoming possible to store books, journals, papers, and articles
electronically and deliver them over high-speed networks to consumers. As with office
information systems, digital publishing is being extended to handle multimedia documents
consisting of text, audio, image, and video data and animation. In some cases, the amount of
information available to be put online is enormous, in the order of petabytes (1015 bytes),
which would make them the largest databases that a DBMS has ever had to manage.