Meryl Streep

The sale of audiobooks has skyrocketed in recent years. In 2012, total industry sales in the book business fell just under 1 percent over all, but those of downloadable audiobooks rose by more than 20 percent. That year, 13,255 titles came out as audiobooks, compared with 4,602 in 2009. Publishers seem to be paying more attention to their production. When Simon and Schuster published Colm Toibin’s “Testament of Mary” last autumn, the narrator was Meryl Streep.

Nora Ephron, an essayist and humorist in the Dorothy Parker mold (only smarter and funnier, some said) who became one of her eras most successful screenwriters and filmmakers, making romantic comedy hits like and When Harry Met Sally, died Tuesday night in Manhattan. She was 71. The cause was pneumonia brought on by acute myeloid leukemia, her son Jacob Bernstein said. In a commencement address she delivered in 1996 at Wellesley College, her alma mater, Ms. Ephron recalled that women of her generation werent expected to do much of anything. But she wound up having several careers, all of

Children’s e-book reading is still in very early stages — but with parents increasingly handing iPads down to their kids, publishers see room for fast growth. Scholastic launched a children’s e-reading app, Storia, last month. Launching today is Ruckus Media Group’s new iPad app, Ruckus Reader. It offers books for 3- to 8-year-olds from brands like My Little Pony, Curious George and the Transformers, and reports back to parents on their kids’ reading skills. Ruckus Reader titles can be downloaded individually, and many are free. Or parents can buy access to the whole library for $24.99 for six months.