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Taylor Swift’s new Eras Tour book is a massive hit, despite the fact readers have pointed out numerous typos and design blunders.
According to Circana — which tracks around 85 percent of the print market — more than 814,000 copies of Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour Book were sold during the weekend of Thanksgiving (November 30 to December 1). The book, which costs $40, was first exclusively launched in U.S. Target stores on Black Friday (November 29).
The sales put Swift in rare company. The only bigger nonfiction launch was the first volume of Barack Obama’s presidential memoirs, A Promised Land, which sold 816,000 copies its first week on shelves in 2020, according to Circana, which does not include audio and e-book sales. But Obama’s memoir was available through all major outlets and Circana’s tracking for Eras Tour Book accounts only for its first weekend sales.
The success of Swift’s book comes after some fans slammed the work over its apparently shoddy production. In TikTok a video, a fan named Emily who woke up at 5 a.m. to purchase the book called out the “grammatical errors, blurry photos, and design flaws.” Some readers have even dubbed it the “errors tour book.”
Flipping through the pages of the book, the TikToker pointed out that the song “this is me trying” from Swift’s 2020 album Folklore is written as: “this is me rying.”
Another typo was in the song title “gold rush,” which failed to include a space between the two words.
Although Emily applauded certain highlights from the book, such as Swift’s “behind-the-scenes” section from the tour, she still questioned why a book worth $40 would have so many grammatical errors.
“If you’re 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” she said. “Wouldn’t you expect the pictures to be crisp and clean and not blurry?”
She added: “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.”
The Independent has contacted representatives for Swift and Target for comment.
The “All Too Well” singer released her book only one week before her recording-breaking Eras tour, which first started in March 2023, comes to an end. She’ll be doing three shows in Vancouver, Canada this weekend, with her final show on Sunday (December 8).
Additional reporting by The Associated Press
