Simon & Schuster, Hachette E-Book Accord Wins Approval

A price-fixing settlement between the U.S. government and electronic-book publishers Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group Inc. and HarperCollins Publishers LLC was approved by a judge in New York.

The Justice Department in April sued the three publishers along with Apple, Pearson’s Penguin Group and MacMillan, a unit of Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH. The government claimed the defendants conspired to fix the price for e-books in violation of U.S. antitrust law. U.S. District Judge Denise Cote agreed with the government that the settlement is in the public interest.