Confusing wording in section 3.2 about book HOT 2 CLOSED

Agreed, it's confusing and incorrect.

I like your alternate explanation, though I would make it clear that:

• Our computers are byte-oriented, meaning that consecutive addresses are 1 byte apart
• We used mov word, and a word is 2 bytes, thus we move over 2 spots. So even if instead of the 0x0248 representing H we moved the 1 byte number 0x20 (a black space character on a black background), we still would have to move over 2 spots, as the missing digits are assumed to be zero.

from book.

I'm not working on the first edition anymore, so I'm going to give this a close. This stuff isn't in the second edition yet, and it's not likely to make it exactly. If someone wants to send in a PR to fix up the first edition, please feel free!

from book.