If you were at the Print & ePublishing Conference last week, you know words can’t adequately describe the fun buzz of in-person community and information-sharing that we experienced. If you weren’t there, you’re going to want to check out the following stories and links.

The Conference brought together 400 attendees from four continents, just about doubling the size of last year’s event in Seattle. We had folks from all areas of publishing, and the feedback has been tremendous. Here’s one comment from an attendee that seems to reflect a feeling we heard a number of times: “I loved the variety of information presented, the accessibility of speakers and conference organizers, and the networking. The conference was so great that I would be willing to pay my own money (rather than my employer’s) to attend. Thanks David and Anne-Marie for such an awesome learning experience. I’m looking forward to next year.”

Chris Kitchener (Lead InDesign Product Manager) asking a question during the Talk Back to Adobe Session

Post-PePCon linkage love…

The PDF of conference speaker’s handouts was almost 350 pages long, and is only available to registered attendees. But a few people made conference-related files available for public download after the conference ended.

• Gabriel Powell tweeted a link to his  InDesign preflight profile (zip file) for eBook production.
• Ron Bilodeau wrote a post on Creating Successful eBooks with links to his GREP Expressions text file that he uses to clean up EPUB files in Oxygen (which he demo’d during one of his presentations) and his PDF guide to Setting up your InDesign CS5.5 files for ePub export
• Adam Jury (of DirtyWordsDesign.com) was a volunteer IGNITE InDesign presenter and RPG publisher who sells a lot of PDFs. He wrote a post for PePCon people on Creating PDFs for iPads. Go to that post to download his InDesign to iPad PDF preset (a .joboption file you can import into InDesign).
• Tony Harmer, the InDesign User Group leader from the UK, performed an original, Beowulf-length epic poem entitled “Dear Adobe: InDesign Should Have Support for AcroForms”

Russell Viers, Mordy Golding, Michael Ninness, and Mike Rankin discussing The Future of Publishing

Articles, Images, and Tweets written about PePCon 2011

• Chuck Green captured the spirit of the conference in his article Behind the Scenes at the 2011 InDesignSecretsLive Print & ePublishing Conference (and he wins the journalist-of-the-year award for getting the name of the conference exactly right!)
• Chris Ryland from Em Software’s Print and ePublishing Conference Report
• Jake Van Ness from Prepressology and the Rookie Designer wrote a 2-part recap of the conference, one for each day, wonderfully detailed. Day 1 and Day 2. They say there’s more to come.
• Kitty Florido (the other half of Rookie Designer) wrote about how Michael Ninness’s keynote changed the way she thinks about her work: We Are Content Creators
• Adobe’s Jerry Silverman, one of the presenters, wrote about Adobe’s presence at the conference in the Adobe blog Government Bits
• If you weren’t following the #pepcon hashtag on Twitter (perhaps you don’t even normally use Twitter), that’s okay: We’ve captured most of the thread, and there’s some great stuff in there. You can read it in chronological order (start at the bottom) here.
• Want to see what it was like? Look at this Flickr group of photos! If you have videos or photos from the event, please upload them, add the pepcon11 tag, and add them to this group! (Or send them to us with permission, and we can upload them for you.)
• Or, you can look through the social networking site that we set up for the conference — some fun discussions and comments in there.

Gifts (for computer and mind)

While the greatest gift was that of new friendships and great information from presenters, conference attendees are also getting over $600 worth of gifts from our sponsors, including:

• a one-month subscription to lynda.com,
• a one-year subscription (or renewal) to InDesign Magazine from CreativePro.com
• the awesome Style Utilities pack of plug-ins from In-Tools.com
• a special copy of Soxy from Rorohiko
• a free copy of Multi Find/Change from automatication
• 3 month subscription to the Seybold Report
• the amazing PatternPack and PatternMaker plug-ins from Teacup Software
• the URL2hyperlink plug-in from DTP Tools
• some free credits from istockphoto
• 50 free customized business cards from MOO.com

Plus everyone got a free ebook, 300 pages of speaker handouts, a cool coffee mug (it’s huge! good for soup!), and a bunch of other goodies.

The two of us got to give away over $8000 in prizes at the end of the conference.

We should mention that during the final session, we were lucky enough to give away some fabulous door prizes, including a 20-person package of the full Adobe Font Folio, a CS5.5 Master Collection, a copy of InData from Em Software, a copy of PDF2ID from Recosoft, Sonar Bookends for both InDesign and Acrobat from Virginia Systems, a $1400 license for Twixl Publisher, a subscription to Design Tools Monthly, By the way, you can learn more about the conference sponsors here, including information about a last-minute sponsor, PressRun.

All in all, we honestly could not have asked for a better conference. If you were there, a sincere thank you for participating — you helped make this event as good as it was. If you weren’t able to attend, then we hope to see you next year!

Photos above courtesy of attendee Jim Beales. Here are a few final photos from some other folks that help capture the sense of being there:

Keith Gilbert working with an attendee at the Meet the Speaker "help desk" (photo courtesy Russell Viers)

One comment we heard a lot was: "The food is great!" Here's some antipasti served during the Monday night networking reception (and bingo game)

Bringing people together was a key theme of the event. Here's a photo of Marijan Tompa (tomaxxi), who was able to fly from Serbia to PePCon thanks to donations from all over the world. (Photo courtesy Kris Coppieters)