No High Court Hearing|for Apple E-Book Verdict

(CN) – Government officials cheered Monday after the U.S. Supreme Court put Apple on the path to paying $400 million for fixing e-book prices.     Though Apple had wanted the justices to take up its appeal, the Supreme Court denied Apple a writ of certiorari on Monday. The case was one of dozensof cases Apple refused to take up in a day with no grants andfouropinions.     “Apple’s liability for knowingly conspiring with book publishers to raise the prices of e-books is settled once and for all,” Assistant Attorney General Bill Baer said this afternoon. “And consumers will be made whole.”     The tech giant had been the lone holdout when regulators accused it of conspiring with publishers Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, Penguin, Hachette and HarperCollins to take over the market Amazon used to dominate.     While the other publishers settled for a total of $166 million, Apple took its chances at trial.     After U.S. District Judge Denise Cote found it had played a central role in the price-fixing conspiracy, Apple reached a settlementto avert a trial on damages.     Consumers can now apply their repayments to future purchases, the Department of Justice said in a statement Monday.     Baer said his office’s “steadfast” work “exposed this cynical misconduct by Apple and its book publisher co-conspirators and ensured that justice was done.”