How do you manage your ebooks & web documents?
I've been organizing my personal collection of ebooks (epubs & pdfs) lately so I've been thinking of possible "best practices" to employ and wanted to open a discussion on it.
There are sources for free ebooks online which are trustworthy such as https://archive.org/index.php and https://www.gutenberg.org/ which provide DRM-Free copies in multiple formats.
These are great but a few of my ebooks are from less trusted sources so handling the security aspects should be considered as well. (Example: An interesting PDF from Hacker News or Reddit)
General:
For general organization and management, Calibre (https://calibre-ebook.com/) has been very useful so far. You can use Calibre to handle converting, meta-data, reading, and organization of your library.
Security:
From what I can research the epub and pdf formats can be both vulnerable to malicious but the potential is much higher for pdf. As you then might expect, pdf exploits are more common.
A few precautions you can take include using your browsers pdf viewer versus a standalone alternative, using an up to date and secure pdf reading with JavaScript disabled, or relying on a cloud service such as google drive that allows online viewing.
An offline e-reader is another easy solution as the malicious code would require a much more specific attack vector.
Reading:
https://us.norton.com/internetsecurity-emerging-threats-is-it-safe-to-download-free-ebooks-online.html
https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/notes/epub-javascript-security/
I tend to just manage my ebooks with Calibre, and I suppose I don't worry too much about reading PDFs (though I, of course, keep my software up to date).
I just wanted to add that https://standardebooks.org is a great resource for high-quality ebooks, in addition to the ones you have mentioned.
I also recommended Calibre. It definitely is not a looker but it works awesomely for managing my ebooks on my Kindle. My favorite feature is that it has the option to put your ebooks online so that it's easy to download on my Kindle.
It converts, stores, and shares eBooks and it does it well.
Do check out Polar. https://getpolarized.io/
Hmm! This looks cool -- do you find the spaced repetition stuff useful? I use Zotero now, but I'd consider a switch if it was really useful on keeping knowledge established.
I don't use it that much since I don't have the need for it but I love the developer's passion and philosophy, and as a tool it's really powerful. Calibre is atrociously bad imo, especially compared to Polar.
I would honestly treat that Norton thing as FUD to sell their products. I am a regular user of libgen and various IRC channels for pirated e-things (I buy some things, but FUCK spending my money on research articles where the research is publicly funded, and also fuck buying before I know if something is garbage). I have been doing this for decades, and not once in all that time has any antivirus caught anything. Not Norton when I've had that (long ago), not Malwarebytes, not Windows Defender, nothing. Nothing has been caught, and I've never had any issues.
Now, that is miles away from being proof that there is no issue, and I certainly don't do anything stupid like disable UAC/firewalls/some form of malware protection, and I don't let myself be vulnerable to ransomware by having single copies of anything - but in terms of risk % of getting some attack from some source my use case is about as high as it is possible to be and prolific, and zip zilch nada.
This is somewhat off topic, but ai wish more filesystems had BeFS style metadata indexing. Haiku tries to fill in the metadata automatically, so it's really easy to find a piece of media based on authors, titles, or whatever.
Somewhat related, but there's a service called Libreture that gives you cloud storage for your ebooks, in addition to giving you your own OPDS feed. I used to store some books on there, then download and read them through the OPDS feed onto my phone.
I believe this is something you could also set up in Calibre, but I liked that Libreture's implementation was easy.