[Quoth]

The visible light LEDs are designed to give a diffuse reflection from the screen. They are only needed when reading by candle or in the dark. Normal safe lighting doesn't require them.

The IR LEDs are scanned, with about 15 vertical beams and 21 horizontal beams (on H2O). The beams ONLY illuminate across the surface. They are so weak a sensitive IR detector ABOVE the screen can't detect them. Only one beam at a time is lit!

There is zero risk.

It's not "obsolete" technology. It's actually the best technology for passive screens like eInk as resistive and capacitive screens reduce the brightness and contrast. The resistive and capacitive layers can also degrade the sharpness. The eInk advantage for reading is that only so called "retina" OLED or LCD are sharper, it's the lowest power (partly because normally it uses only ambient light and partly because it's bistable, white areas or black dots do not need refreshed at all, unlike LCD and OLED which must be refreshed fast enough to avoid flicker.) The eInk with IR sensing has the highest reading angle variation, tilting capacitive or resistive sensor screens exposes the pattern. Also the LCD requires a separate backlight and front filter, so colour and contrast shifts due to parallax error (the mono LCD behind the colour pattern). The OLED are not true LEDs, they are really amorphous electroluminescent dots and some need a phosphor to convert the colour. Both the OLED dot and the phosphor wears out faster than plasma screens and they suffer "burn in" like old green CRTS.

So for reading books eInk and IR touch is the best technology in terms of battery life, readability, lack of eye strain, viewing angle etc.

The IR touch system is very safe. IR, Resistive and Capacitive all date back to the mid 1980s. The touch screen PDAs (mono LCD) and CRT colour terminals for public interaction used all three technologies.
Of these three the Resistive is the best resolution, but needs most pressure. Capacitive is lowest resolution, but for a finger based GUI (like Apple BOUGHT in for iPhone) on backlight LCD or OLED (inherent emitters) the capacitive is fine.
The ultimate stylus based technology is the Wacom tablet. It's possible to combine it with resistive or capacitive.
Some phones have capacitive AND resistive to allow easy finger operation and handwriting.
The IR is somewhere between the capacitive and resistive (potentially) in resolution and is totally safe.