I get eBooks and literature from a variety of places. Mostly legal places, like Amazon - but sometimes from other random places.

PDFs are more popular and come with advanced capabilities, like JScript, that should be disabled in the name of security.

Are there any known security issues for other e-Formats - like ePubs - or are there steps that should be taken to protect ones self? Mainly for when getting books from different sources and being used on Windows/Android/Kindle/etc?


Most reading systems for epubs do not include JavaScript support at this time, so you're fairly safe. For those that do, the IDPF (International Digital Publishing Forum; they're the folks who make the epub standard) has a section on security in the epub 3.0 spec. It pretty much lays the onus on the reading system developers to disable various avenues of attack. One thing of note is that all their points are phrased as "reading systems should" where "should" means:


So their security concerns may or may not be addressed by individual reading systems. It's a good bet that the major ones will play ball, though--particularly as most of them have someone in the IDPF.

As far as downloading stuff from random places on the web--well, run a virus scan on anything you get and you'll probably be okay, but that's always riskier than going through "official" channels.

  • 1
    To add to Tom's answer: Apple probably disabled localStorage and, more prominently, network access from JS code in iBooks, for security reasons. – Alberto Pettarin Feb 14 '14 at 21:43

Your Answer

