Over the years I've gotten pretty good at subverting intellectual property and copyright, so I thought I'd take a few minutes to lay out the places I normally go to find things.
---- General ----
Snahp.it - successor to r/MegaLinks. Has media of all times spanning from movies, tv shows, music, books, games, computer software,etc. Really good place to look for just about everything. Registration Required.
Mobilism - Site that has mostly ebooks, audiobooks, and cracked apps for android and ios (jailbreak only). Registration required to use search.
The Eye - An archive site filled with random shit. You can find a lot of stuff there. I've used it for linux games and roms.
---- Books ----
B-ok - Main site I go to for books.
Archive.org - Not piracy, but a really good source for older books.
Library Genesis - Search engine for books and research paper. Probably really useful but I don't use it very often.
IRC - Good place to check if b-ok doesn't have what you're looking for. Requires an irc client. Guide to setting one up: https://archive.is/j7By6
Audiobook Bay - place for audiobooks. Uses torrents and requires a registration.
Another thing that's kind of useful is the ability to remove DRM from ebooks that you've bought or that you've borrowed from archive.org. If you have any interest in that there's a plugin for Calibre (ebook management software) here and instructions: https://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/2012/09/10/drm-removal-tools-for-ebooks/
---- Research Papers ----
Sci-Hub - sci-hub isn't a search engine for research papers so you're going to have to use googlescholar or another search engine and then either copy the title into sci-hub. It normally recognizes titles, but DOIs are unique and preferable. DOIs have a format similar to this: 10.2105/ajph.76.6.661
SemanticScholar - Similar to GoogleScholar. It's the research search engine I use, it often has pdfs available for research papers.
Library Genesis - Search engine for research papers and books.
---- Tips ----
Given that none of these are torrents/rely on P2P there's less of a risk to not having a vpn because they only interactions that are had are from you to a server, however, it's always a good idea to have a vpn or to use tor browser.
When torrenting, using tor isn't enough. Torrent clients can still leak your ip address even if proxy settings are configured to go through tor. If you don't have/can't get a vpn, I recommend using Whonix. It's a little advanced.