text: ***3. Why Books are Important to Training AI***
  
  Despite the proliferation of online content and some speculating that books would simply die 
  out with the advent of the Internet, 
   books remain a critical vehicle for disseminating 
  knowledge. The more scientists study how books can impact people, the less surprising this 
  is. Our brains have been shown to interact with longform books in meaningful ways: we 
  develop bigger vocabularies when we read books; we develop more empathy when we read 
  literary ﬁction; and connectivity between different regions of our brain increases when we 
  read. 
  
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  In that light, it might be unsurprising that books are important for training AI models. A 
  broadly accessible books dataset could be useful not only for building LLMs, but also for 
  many other types of AI research and development. 
  
  *Performance and Quality*
  
  The performance and versatility of an AI model can signiﬁcantly depend on whether the 
  training corpus includes books or not. Books are uniquely valuable for AI training due to 
  several characteristics. 
  
  •**Length:**Books tend to represent longer-form content, and ﬁction books, in particular, 
  represent long-form narrative. An AI trained on this longer-form, narrative type of 
  content is able to make connections over a longer context, so instead of putting 
  words together to form a single sentence, the AI becomes more able to string 
  concepts together into a coherent whole; even after a book is divided into many 
  “chunks” before the process of tokenization, that will still provide long stretches of 
  text that are longer than the average web page. While Web documents, for instance, 
  tend to be longer than a single sentence, they are not typically hundreds of pages long 
  like a book. 