“When you work in a library, you constantly hear that print is dying, and then you come here and feel so much energy,” said Barbara Moralis, a librarian at Northampton Community College in Bethlehem, Pa., as she waited in a long line to meet the author Andrew Gross. “Publishing is not dead.”

There were, in fact, several signs of health in an industry that has been buffeted by change in recent years.

Oren Teicher, the chief executive of the American Booksellers Association, said unit sales for independents increased nearly 8 percent in 2012. E-book sales, while still growing rapidly in the industry as a whole, have plateaued for some publishers. This provides more stability than the run-amok sales of previous years and gives publishers more clarity about consumers’ book-buying habits.

BookStats, a survey of the industry released last month, revealed that e-books now account for 20 percent of publishers’ revenues, up from 15 percent in 2011. “It seems like the growth rate of e-books has slowed,” said Carolyn Reidy, the chief executive of Simon & Schuster.

While there was the usual tut-tutting about Amazon — Becky Anderson, a co-owner of Anderson’s Bookshops, outside Chicago, referred to it as “the company that shall not be named” — there was also no booth on the exhibit floor from the New York-based unit of Amazon Publishing, which caused much fear and consternation in the industry when it was founded two years ago.

In a panel titled “Publishing, Bookselling and the Whole Damn Thing,” John Sargent, the chief executive of Macmillan, called Attorney General Eric Holder “incompetent,” a comment on the Justice Department antitrust lawsuit against Apple and five publishing companies filed last year. Apple, the only remaining defendant, will go on trial in federal court next week.

But Mr. Sargent said the industry seemed to have stabilized. “I was much more pessimistic a year and a half ago than I was now,” he said.