It's written by Shriram Krishnamurthi, who is a really interesting researcher who cares quite a lot about CS education.
[0] http://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/sk-aut...
Obviously, not helpful against three-letter agencies who like to sit on browser zero-days until they need to use them, but against most threats you'll be fine.
Is it possible that you can download malware and VirusTotal not pick it up? there's a small chance. But, in my estimation, no one is really going to burn a novel strain of malware on free ebooks. It's not targeted and that site isn't a good watering hole to deploy novel malware.
Novel strains of malware are usually reserved for specific targets. Unless you're a high profile target of an authoritarian government or known to have a high networth, I don't really think you're going to get hit with the novel stuff.
TL/DR: VirusTotal will probably be enough for the average user. But no one can guarantee safety when you're downloading random files on the internet.
> Therefore, this website is as legal as search results of any search engines like Google, Yahoo, etc.
It's worth pointing out that this site may link to copyrighted material.
That’s the funny thing about downloading copyrighted works with BitTorrent in Germany, it automatically counts as "at scale" for the courts because you’ll have many peers that all download a bit from you.
2. I turned off my adblocker and checked, it's not fair to call it a "pop-up", it's more like it slides up from the bottom of the screen whenever you load a new page.
Nonetheless ads obviously allow access for all.
