Readers are often warned not to judge a book by its cover, but what about its publicity? That is the basis of a class-action lawsuit against former President Jimmy Carter and his publisher Simon & Schuster over his 2006 book “Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid,” which was filed in Manhattan federal court on Tuesday.

David Schoen, a Montgomery, Ala., attorney who filed the suit, said by telephone that the book was falsely marketed as an accurate account of peace negotiations in the Middle East. “You cannot market it as the absolute truth on something when it’s not,” Mr. Schoen said, citing as examples criticisms of the account by the United States diplomat Dennis Ross and Kenneth W. Stein, a Carter adviser who resigned from the Carter Center after calling the book “replete with factual errors.” The book became a target of criticism from the moment it was published because of the use of the word “apartheid” in the title. Mr. Schoen said the pro-Israeli group Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America formally asked the publisher to make corrections, but was rebuffed.

Adam Rothberg, a spokesman for Simon & Schuster, issued a statement: “This lawsuit is frivolous, without merit, and is a transparent attempt by the plaintiffs, despite their contentions, to punish the author, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and world-renowned statesman, and his publisher, for writing and publishing a book with which the plaintiffs simply disagree. It is a chilling attack on free speech that we intend to defend vigorously.”

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