As for actual impact, books3 made its way into BloombergGPT and LLaMA. I’m just happy it made LLaMA a little better.
Would I do it again? Well, given that there’s little benefit other than warm feelings about LLaMA and pride that hackers can make an open source ChatGPT competitor with this, that’s a tough question.
As for the line, I invite you to download books3 and try reading one of the books. The experience is positively awful. Notepad isn’t a good book reader; it’s missing images, which renders lots of the technical books less useful; and the markdown format isn’t even modern markdown syntax. Code snippets are indented with 4 spaces instead of surrounded with triple backticks.
Meanwhile anyone seriously interested in reading a book will go straight to libgen and get the real book themselves. So I’m skeptical of claims of harm.
As for whether it’s wrong, let history be my judge.