Library Genesis when it's up and Anna's Archive. Anna's Archive's database is a proper superset of the Library Genesis database but IMO Library Genesis is a little easier to search. For both sites, make sure you're rocking uBlock Origin.

I don't know much about TorGuard VPN, but it's probably fine if it's been fine for pirating other stuff. Books are on the order of 300MB for uncompressed scans or 3-50MB for books that are rendered directly to PDF, i.e. it's not that much data unless you're training the next ChatGPT. I pirate a lot of academic books as an autistic PhD student and I've had no issues 😆

Happy reading! 🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️🏴🏴🏴

Anna's Archive is great if you know what you're looking for. No pirating or VPN needed.

If you don’t mind going through the trouble of the “interview” to join a private tracker, I have heard very good things about MyAnonaMouse

Adding to what others have said, I got Calibre-Web Automated set up and put KOreader on an old Kindle, so that when I find a book I can just upload it to CWA and easily browse the home library from my device (it sync progress too if you read on multiple devices).

You can also use calibre (desktop version) to strip DRM from library books so you can return the them earlier for someone else to borrow :)

If he wants audiobooks, audiobookbay. If he wants epub, myanonamouse is your best bet

I've been using the opencalibre subreddit for years