Two antitrust lawsuits that accused Amazon and five big book publishers of illegally conspiring to fix prices of traditional and electronic books in the United States were dismissed on Thursday by a federal judge.
The five book publishers targeted by the two lawsuits were Macmillan, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Penguin Random House. The first lawsuit was an antitrust litigation filed by Seattle-based law firm Hagens Berman. It was filed in the Southern District of New York in January last year, and it alleged that big publishers conspired with Amazon to keep the prices of e-books artificially inflated and sought to suppress price competition in the retail space….