It's alright for free. The slow downloads are still perfectly usable unless there are server-side issues, and they also provide links to other mirrors (libgen.li, which is still up, Z-lib, and IPFS).
Just needed to remake a Z-lib account recently (without an account you can read but not download I think), and an alias from simplelogin worked. With temp-mail services I wasnt getting the confirmation email. And I ain't gonna use my domain for pirating, sorry :)
The torrents are alive; as long as you can get the torrent links from libgen, you have access to the files. (No need to share whole archives either, you can pick & choose).
The name of the pdf file inside the torrent is its md5 hashsum without the .pdf extension.
On libgen.rs you can see the md5 hashsum on the download page; on libgen.li you need to look at the JSON file provided at the link on the search result , as they don't render it on the ui.
Firstly, I search for the book among Telegram book groups. Then, Google/DDG/Bing/Yandex results for "[title of the book i'm searching] filetype:pdf". If neither yields the book, I turn on my Tor and try to find it inside Imperial Library of Trantor. Worst case scenario, I try to find a working Z-Library HS. But some comments here added to my possibilities, such as Libgen (I knew Libgen from onion, but it's interesting to see it also routeable on surface).