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Footnote Summit 2013 (#footnotesummit)

Well, the FootnoteSummit has come and gone...


Yesterday, I had the good fortune to be one of those able to attend the FootNote summit 2013, my company sponsored me, of course, just before tickets ran out.

Those who had the good fortune to attend, were wowed with statistics and information regarding Digital Publishing both nationally and internationally. We were treated to an awesome lunch, a "free" touchscreen stylus, a "free" 3 month subscription to Getaway Magazine ... a "free" lunch, and an awesome opportunity to make friends.

Friends were made...

I had the rare opportunity to make friends with another "techie" named Arthur Atwell. We chatted a bit about his Paperight business, and I was able to shed some light for him on how to make EPUB3 documents... I have only recently discovered that it's possible to take an EPUB2 file and massage it into a valid EPUB3 file by a tedious process of manual editing... This is a post for another day though.

Cards were exchanged

If any of you have watched a romantic comedy (or romcom) as it is widely known, you will undoubtedly remember a scene of some young woman exchanging numbers with some your guy ... much to the guy's excitement. That is kind of what happened at the FootnoteSummit, but in this case everyone was exchanging business cards... I swear, I have never seen so many people swapping business cards at one time in my life...

Sadly the fun was over

At the end of the day, we had been wooed and wowed with presentation after fantastic presentation. There were global representatives from all facets of the digital publishing industry present to knock our socks off with demos of awesome new technologies...

But all the fun had to come to an end as the day closed at around 15:30, just enough time for us to beat the traffic in C.T 

On the plus side, I was pleased to discover that in South Africa, I am one of the few people who understands how to take an existing EPUB2 document and edit that file so that we end up with a valid EPUB3 eBook, it's quite astounding to know that most people don't understand how to go from version 2 to version 3 without paying exorbitant fees to have the book redone...

Well, I enjoyed myself and learned a lot, le't hope that we are able to attend the summit next year too.
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