On Black Friday last week, Taylor Swift released her highly anticipated book celebrating her record-breaking Eras Tour. However, the self-published $40 book was plagued with errors, leaving fans quite disappointed.
The book, sold exclusively at Target stores across the United States, officially hit shelves on Black Friday. While there was much excitement surrounding its release, fans quickly took to social media to express their disappointment with the final product.
According to the Daily Mail, fans noted quite a few glaring mistakes in the book. For example, the concert date index page was missing a Toronto tour date, and some sketches of Taylor’s concert outfits were inaccurately colored or depicted costumes that she never actually wore on stage. Additionally, the book promised “never-before-seen performance photos from every era.” Instead, many of those “photos” were actually just freeze-frames from the Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour film, shot in Los Angeles and released in theaters last year.
Fans also reported glaring grammatical errors and misspelled words along with other typos and other issues, including one instance where a fan discovered her book was printed completely upside down. Since the books were sealed in plastic wrap to prevent fans from seeing the product without purchasing the gook, these flaws only came to light after buyers opened the book.
In a now-viral TikTok, a fan named Emma delivered a particularly critical review, sharing her disappointment with the product.
“When I got home and started flicking through the book, I was actually blown away by the amount of grammatical mistakes, so many in fact that I am seriously questioning if this book was even edited,” Emma stated in her video. “If there are certain spelling mistakes that are really distracting, it really takes me out of the reading experience, and I really, really felt that with this book.”
“If you are paying $40 for a book, wouldn’t you expect it to not have this many errors? Wouldn’t you expect the pictures to not be cut off? Wouldn’t you expect the pictures to be crisp and clean and not blurry?” she continued. “I don’t know what happened. I don’t know if they were on a deadline or what. The grammatical problems that I have found should have been fixed right away.”
And all of these issues fall right back on Swift because the book was published by the pop sensation’s own publishing company – Taylor Swift Publishing.
Needless to say, these are some pretty horrible mistakes from Swift, and the news led to a lot of reactions.
“As long as she makes money I don’t think she cares,” one person wrote on Reddit.
“Grammatical errors? There’s barely any text in the book… Not going to say it was ‘false advertising’ when my source was social media hype, but everyone was making it sound like there was going to be all this brand new trivia, and it’s just a paragraph from Taylor about each Era next to a bunch of photos everyone has seen before,” another fan added.
“I have never heard one good thing about quality Taylor merch,” another person added.
“It’s a cash grab, folks!” someone else wrote.
“This is why you always have to proofread your material before releasing it. Otherwise, it comes off as a first draft, and/or just lazy,” another person added.
“This actually makes me sad for them. They put her on this pedestal and she doesn’t even care enough to put a little effort into her merch,” someone else wrote
Clearly, people are not happy with the pop superstar.