The one-shot performance of their recall attempts is much less impressive. The two best-performing models were only able to reproduce about 70% of a 1000-token string. That's still pretty good, but it's not as if they spit out the book verbatim.

In other words, if you give an LLM a short segment of a very well known book, it can guess a short continuation (several sentences) reasonably accurately, but it will usually contain errors.