Fun fact: epub can contain a virus without being an exe. Epub is essentially an archive of text, image and stylesheet files (try opening it with WinRAR, you might be surprised). You can put a malware script inside that archive, and it won’t flag until you try opening that ebook on your PC. So you actually need to be more careful with ebooks than, say, video or audio files.
I use PIA’s Canada servers for torrenting because they are (geographically) closest to the US with port forwarding. No issues, been using them for years.