I was at Apollycon as a friend's author assistant this weekend. As such, I didn't see any panels, and mostly participated in the signings and some of the social stuff. It is a ginormous event. There were something like 500 authors and about 1500 attendees, so it was big and at one point Saturday as we were gathering stuff up, we saw the line starting and it was impressive. I can't really speak to how well it worked as a reader, since the advantage of having the assistant badge was that I got to skip a lot of lines and lines are always the part where I start hating everyone. I did watch one volunteer take over management for a cover model who had developed a big line and keep that line moving and make sure that people got their books signed and photos taken all while keeping as much out of the way of the other lines as they could. So, I saw folks jumping in and trying to make everyone's experience great.
I had told a few authors, if this had been a thing when I was a book nerd teenager, oh wow, would I have been all over this.
All in all I got to say hi to a few authors in the off hours, meet - adjacently - a ton of awesome readers - seriously there were people getting bags, canvases, wooden letters, autograph books, ereader covers, custom photo books, and other paraphernalia signed. Some even had bios, book covers, and/or pull quotes for each author. And seeing that much book love, all in one room, was just amazing.