Yes, I'm about to completely ignore the point of rwg's delightful book report on Algebra I texts. But let me pull out the following quote where Bill pines for the texts of old:
[...] Those books weighed maybe five times less, and contained way more than twice the algebra.
How do people feel about this construction, in which you use the phrase "five times less" to colloquially mean what a formal description would have to call "one fifth as much" or the like? This came up on a blog I read, in which commenters seemed about equally divided between "This is just fine, it's completely obvious what the construction means" and "that's literally meaningless, no reasonable person should produce such a statement." At the time I wondered what the breakdown would be among a mathematician audience, and this seems like a chance to find out. --Michael Kleber -- It is very dark and after 2000. If you continue you are likely to be eaten by a bleen.