I am reading Section 4.1 (An offline algorithm: SmallDB) of The Algorithmic Foundations of Differential Privacy by Dwork and Roth. I am stuck at the proof of Proposition 4.4, which is about the utility guarantee of the small database mechanism (Algorithm 4 in page 70).
Proposition 4.4. Let $\mathcal{Q}$ be any class of linear queries. Let $y$ be the database output by SmallDB($x,\mathcal{Q},\epsilon,\alpha$). Then with probability $1-\beta$:
$$
\max_{f\in\mathcal{Q}}|f(x)-f(y)|\le\alpha+\frac{2\left(\frac{\log|\mathcal{X}|\log|\mathcal{Q}|}{\alpha^2}+\log\left(\frac{1}{\beta}\right)\right)}{\epsilon\|x\|_1}.
$$
Proof. Applying the utility bounds for the exponential mechanism (Theorem 3.11) with $\Delta u=\frac{1}{\|x\|_1}$ and $\text{OPT}_q(x)\le\alpha$ (which follows from Theorem 4.2), we find:
$$
\Pr\left[\max_{f\in\mathcal{Q}}|f(x)-f(y)|\ge\alpha+\frac{2}{\epsilon\|x\|_1}\left(\log|\mathcal{R}|+t\right)\right]\le e^{-t}.
$$
Here $\mathcal{R}=\{y\in\mathbb{N}^{|\mathcal{X}|}:\|y\|_1=\log|\mathcal{Q}|/\alpha^2\}$ is the collection of small databases, and $u:\mathbb{N}^{|\mathcal{X}|}\times\mathcal{R}\to\mathbb{R}$ is given by
$$
u(x,y)=-\max_{f\in\mathcal{Q}}|f(x)-f(y)|,
$$
which measures the similarity between an arbitrary database $x$ and a small database $y\in\mathcal{R}$.
My question: Why is $\Delta u=1/\|x\|_1$? According to page 38, $\Delta u$ is defined by
$$
\Delta u=\max_{y\in\mathcal{R}}\max_{\|x-x'\|_1\le 1}|u(x,y)-u(x',y)|,
$$
so $\Delta u$ should not depend on the size of any database $x$.
