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The Tech Forum – the tech importance behind ebooks

Canada is a country that is in constant search of ways for making accessibility to knowledge and specialization a possibility within every citizen’s hands.

Proof of such comes with the fact that the country has a big variety of conferences throughout the year. The industry that we will be focusing on with this article is tech publishing, or a more familiar term: ebooks.

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What does a tech forum have to do with ebooks?

There is a major annual conference which takes place in Toronto called Tech Forum. This conference is held targeting the ebook production community. One of the fundamental purposes of the Tech Forum is to be a source of strategic information, helpful for everyone involved in ebook development.

When ebooks first began to become popular, a commonly used term to define it was digital book. Today, this industry is much more than just a traditional book made digital. It has turned out to be a whole new industry.

There are hundreds of professionals developing strategies, data, analysis, technological progress and networks in order to advance in this industry. It is no longer just about digitalizing a book. It has evolved to be more complex than that, and therefore it now needs more in depth-specialized and technical formation.

The Tech Forum coordinates and gathers precisely all the above. The conference has another conference within, the ebookcraft, which was programmed to be held on March 21st and 22nd 2018, one being a workshop day and the other displaying the main conference.

 To get a broader idea of what the Tech Forum has to offer in the ebook world, we can analyze some interesting and insightful details about the speakers that attended in 2017:

Saadia Muzaffar. Founder of TechGirls, a space for Canadian women working in math, science, engineering and technology. She focuses on tech leadership, entrepreneurship and business strategies.

She has featured in some of the most outstanding and influential magazines like CNN Money and Fortune Magazine, just to name a couple. She is an advocate for diversity in business and has spoken and written about it. Her last book project is titled: Change Together: A diversity guidebook for startups and scaleups.

Jiminy Panoz. This freelancer has been dedicated to working with French authors, and helping them make the transition to the ebook world. For this mission, he has developed special tools; he designs audits and interactive activities to support the learning and understanding of the digital world to these traditional authors. He also created and is working in his open source website called chapalpanoz.com.

Scaahi Koul. She is currently a senior writer at the famous platform, Buzzfeed, which has many followers through social media thanks to their innovative and informational posts.

Before Buzzfeed, Koul worked for The Huffington Post Canada, Maclean’s and Hazlitt as a professional writer. She also wrote many of her articles for other important publications through freelancing work.

Steve Murgaski. He is completely blind, and he’s also an extremely enthusiast reader. Murgaski works in this industry towards making it more accessible each day.

His work and experience consists of testing different types of websites to ensure accessibility. One of his areas of interest is supporting the creation of texts that contain graphs and mathematical symbols, and making that specific information understandable for people who are blind, with the use of braille.

He has recently partnered with the National Network for Equitable Library Service. The NNELS is an establishment owned and sustained in majority by Canadian public libraries. What they do is that along with authors, publishers and international partners, they take an original book and transform it into an accessible copied format for people who have certain print disabilities.

These types of disabilities fall under three big categories:

  • Severe or total impairment of sight or hearing or the inability to focus or move one’s eyes,
  • The inability to hold or manipulate a book, or
  • An impairment relating to comprehension.

As we all know, there is a big number of areas and genres when it comes to books. You can be a person developing in business, art, music, history, technology, leadership, social sciences, physics, languages, etc., and as long as you become an author of a book regarding your area of specialty, you will want to gain knowledge in ebook technology.

Today, technology is a magical source that can be used in favor of all those amazing authors that wish to transmit knowledge to the world. The annual Tech Forum in Canada is a definite enforcing step towards achieving that goal.