I have an eBook that is rather high quality.... would really appreciate any tips on how best to utilise it to get the maximum SEO results for a small and rather new site ....

When you say... "rather high quality"... do you mean... better than all other content on this subject that exists on the web?

If I had that I would build it into a website and promote it.  Will probably get lots of links and make you famous. 

I believe that if you have a page targeting a single keyword "sarees" and you link out to many other pages that have information about specific types of sarees that you have a strong presentation.

I don't think that it would be smart to have a page about sarees and be afraid to link to other pages using that word.

If you look at the speakers and topics list you will see that the agenda is very impressive.  Looks like it will be time very well spent.

I'm a total newbie to SEOmoz and am totally addicted.

That says it all.  I am confident that you will get a lot out of it and will arrive back home with an enormous list of improvements to make.

The people who need to worry about getting their money's worth out of a conference are the people who are not addicted.  They think they can go there, sip coffee and fart, then go back home as an SEO expert.

Autogenerated or inserted by hand makes no difference.

I get LOTS of traffic because I cover some events and some people search for them with a date.

To be certain that Google can read your dates or any other text information, view your page in google's cache.