Radiohead, Beyoncé and U2 are among the artists to have explored new ways of releasing music through the internet so as to maximise impact and revenues.

Roy Keane and his publishers, it seems, may have been thinking way further outside the box than any of them with copies of his new autobiography The Second Half going on sale yesterday in random British supermarkets where journalists promptly bought them and then raced to tweet the best bits.

One journalist reported buying his copy at a Tesco "superstore" in Burnage, south Manchester, and when informed that shop staff had told The Irish Times that they hadn't received any copies yet, he simply suggested that they should "have a look down the back".

Clearly, there was more than one shop that had jumped the gun with copies seen in multiple locations although it wasn’t clear last night whether there had been some widespread misunderstanding regarding the embargo that was supposed to be in place until Thursday’s official launch or one had simply jumped the gun and the rest had decided when word leaked out that there was little point at that stage in being left behind.

Whatever the truth of it, the – how shall we put this – soft launch, has taken just a little of the shine off Thursday’s media event at the Aviva stadium where journalists, including some who were flying in especially for the occasion, were to be presented with copies of the book at 10am then given roughly four hours to read as much as they could before the Corkman arrived to answer questions about the content just after lunchtime.

With a typical book of this type coming in at perhaps 80,000 words and taking an average word as having five letters, it would only take 2,500 tweets to get the entire thing out, which seems entirely plausible well before then.

Jim Binchy, group managing director at publishers Hachette Ireland, insisting that Thursday’s launch proceeds as planned.

“The book is scheduled to go out on Thursday,” he said, “and at that stage everybody will have the opportunity to read it after which, at the event he is doing on the 22nd, they can hear Roy’s full account of things . . .”