It's actually fun to entertain the possibility. How would you exploit this? It could be just replaced cryptographic constants in key papers... But it could also be some random psychological "discoveries" for the people to quote. A couple of "10-hour shifts considered very good" here and there, and the society will be completely brought to waste by the middle-managers unable to stop quoting them.

They only host PDFs and EPUBs, so there's no software involved.

While I think it’s incorrect to assume PDFs cannot be exploited, I’m using computer viruses as a metaphor. What if a legit chemistry paper was tampered with such that the procedure creates and explosively releases a nerve agent and a cheap grad student that didn’t pay for the legal copy unknowingly follows it?

> What if a legit chemistry paper was tampered with such that the procedure creates and explosively releases a nerve agent and a cheap grad student that didn’t pay for the legal copy unknowingly follows it?

That grad student is visited by representatives from the military-industrial complex and is quickly drafted to doing that again. Imagine creating nerve agents by accident, what a breakthrough!

Both the PDF and EPUB formats allow embedding programs within them. The risk of malware is remote but real.