Penguin and Macmillan Deny e-Book Price Fixing The government's complaint "piles innuendo on top of innuendo." It is based "entirely on the little circumstantial evidence it was able to locate." And it "sides with a monopolist." These arguments were part of a response by two publishers, Penguin Group USA and Macmillan, to a Justice Department lawsuit filed in April that accused five major publishing houses of conspiring with Apple to fix the price of e-books. Three of the publishers, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins and the Hachette Book Group, denied violating antitrust laws but agreed last month to settle with the government. Penguin and Macmillan, which declined to settle, filed responses in United States District Court in New York on Tuesday, not only denying that they had fixed prices but also taking direct aim at Amazon, the online retailer that has emerged as a significant threat to the longstanding business model for publishers. In its 74-page response, Penguin called Amazon "predatory" and a "monopolist" that treats books as "widgets." It asserted that Amazon, not Penguin, was the company engaging in anticompetitive behavior, to the detriment of the industry. The Justice Department filed an antitrust lawsuit in April after a lengthy investigation of the publishing industry, saying that the five publishers had colluded with Apple to limit price competition and caused consumers to pay tens of millions more for e-books than they would have otherwise. Five of the six major publishers in the industry moved from a wholesale pricing model to a system known as the agency model in 2010, a move that allowed publishers to begin setting their own e-book prices. The court filings this week laid out the initial defense of Penguin and Macmillan against the lawsuit, rebutting the government's charges that publishers had conspired in e-mails, telephone conversations and over lavish dinners in Manhattan restaurants. In Macmillan's 26-page response, it said, "Absent any direct evidence of conspiracy, the government's complaint is necessarily based entirely on the little circumstantial evidence it was able to locate during its extensive investigation, on which it piles innuendo on top of innuendo, stretches facts and implies actions that did not occur and Macmillan denies unequivocally." Macmillan adopted the agency pricing model on its own, the filing said, because the previous wholesale model "led to Amazon's monopolization of e-book distribution." Penguin, in its response, denied a conspiracy and repeatedly pointed to Amazon, saying that the publisher's own executives were "concerned that Amazon's below-cost pricing strategy for certain new release titles would be detrimental to the long term health of the book industry." Penguin and Macmillan declined to comment on Wednesday. Apple filed its own response to the lawsuit last week, denying that it was part of a conspiracy. In its filing, Apple also referred to Amazon, saying that the government was siding with "monopoly, rather than competition." The response from Macmillan addresses one of the more colorful charges by the government: that the publishers met privately over dinner in upscale restaurants to discuss their conspiracy. John Sargent, Macmillan's chief executive, "dined once or at most twice with peers from certain other publishing houses, but these dinners were social in nature," Macmillan said in its filing. No conspiracy was hatched over any such dinner. John Makinson, the chief executive of Penguin Group, had a "social dinner" on Jan. 28, 2009, Penguin's filing said, but while "general book industry issues and trends were discussed at high-levels of generality, Makinson did so pursuant to antitrust legal advice and avoided competitively sensitive topics like terms of trade, prices or confidential competitive matters." Addressing the charge that Macmillan conspired with other publishers in late 2009 and early 2010, the filing from Macmillan said that no telephone conversation between Mr. Sargent and other publishers had involved collusion. "Indeed, more than half of these telephone "conversations" lasted no more than a few seconds and were nothing more than missed calls," the filing said.