Dawkins on tipping points

Having recently read Malcolm Gladwell's book, The Tipping Point, as well as currently discussing with my friend Jim Rix ways to nudge sales of his book Jingle Jangle: The Perfect Crime Turned Inside Out to a tipping point (and even having watched an episode of the TV program "Mad Men" last night—about Madison Avenue advertising in the 'sixties), I was fascinated this morning to come across the following passage in Richard Dawkins's book, The Blind Watchmaker (about how Darwinian evolution can produce complex organisms like the human brain):

It appears to be a fact that many people will buy a record for no better reason than that a large number of other people are buying the same record, or are likely to do so....
    To a lesser extent, the same phenomenon of popularity being popular for its own sake is well known in the worlds of book publishing, women's fashions, and advertising generally. One of the best things an advertiser can say about a product is that it is the best-selling product of its kind. Best-seller lists are published weekly, and it is undoubtedly true that as soon as a book sells enough copies to appear in one of these lists, its sales increase even more, simply by virtue of that fact. Publishers speak of a book "taking off," and those publishers with some knowledge of science even speak of a "critical mass for take-off." The analogy here is to an atomic bomb...When a book's sales "go critical," the numbers reach the point where word-of-mouth recommendations et cetera cause its sales suddenly to take off in a runaway fashion. Rates of sales suddenly become dramatically larger than they were before critical mass was reached, and there may be a period of exponential growth before the inevitable levelling out and subsequent decline. [from Chapter 8, "Explosions and Spirals," pp. 219-220]