Yes on PDFs in this case. It is designed to exploit the PDF reader when you open it. Though less common today it's still an avenue of attack to watch out for. It depends on the reader too but why take a chance if something is detected
So, how do you download and use PDFs from Anna's Archive or a similar site? Do you download it to a computer that you just use for downloads, then scan the file using Virus Total, then read only on that computer? (I usually read on my phone using Overdrive, just trying to figure out the safest way as a newbie).
Personally I DL on a Linux machine and then upload to virus total. If they are clean, then I transfer them to an old android tablet without internet access for reading. If I was reading them on the machine I'd open them in a linux VM, either alpine or fedora silverblue with network aceess disabled.
The state of the art is qubes OS that has a tool to neuter a PDF by taking screenshots and building a new PDF in different VMs.
Just found out about this myself and it's top tier. The best way to find ebooks IMO. If it doesn't work, use IRC, and if that doesn't work, sign up for Myanonamouse. And if that doesn't just buy the fucking thing. Actually, request it from your library first and then use a de-drm tool to keep it forever
Remember to check the Internet Archive library, you can easily borrow lots of amazing quality books for free and even rip the files. The Standard Template Construct has lots of stuff too, especially recent scientific articles Sci-Hub hasn't published yet
If you use sites like this and you have epubs and pdfs to contribute, make sure that you do! I recently uploaded a book I had access to from my school days for others to use through libgen. I had to search really hard to find it when I didn’t have a lot of money for textbooks. I hope what I uploaded helps others. Be sure to contribute!
From what I understand, isn't this site's Z-Library content taken from the torrent dumps when the site originally got taken off the clearweb? In that case, won't it be a bit out-of-date?
They index results from five sources and update the main ones (two LibGen forks) monthly. They mirrored the Z-Library database before the website was seized (end of November 2022), indexed the new .onion addresses and haven't updated the dataset since because they're waiting for the situation to stabilize in order to figure out a way to regularly fetch new stuff from there too, as far as I know