Ovient TV is a series of interviews with business people. Watch this video to improve your listening and business vocabulary. Below the video, you will find vocabulary definitions, a listening quiz, and a full transcript of the video.

BACKGROUND NOTES ABOUT THE CONTENT OF THIS VIDEO
An independent bookstore is a bookstore that is owned by an individual owner, and the owner is typically a local resident of the area. It is not a national or regional chain. Many large and medium-sized American cities have at least one or two independently-owned bookstores. These bookstores usually sell new and used books as well as other small gift items such as greeting cards, notebooks, toys, and games. Although they have competition from large national bookstores and online sellers, small locally-owned bookstores often carry products that reflect the local culture and often host events such as book club meetings and lectures by authors. Leigh’s Favorite Books is an independently-owned bookstore in Sunnyvale, CA.

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QUIZ

Watch the video, and type the missing words into the boxes. Click on "check answers" to check your answers. The numbers before the word mark the place in the video where you can hear the sentence.

LISTENING COMPREHENSION QUESTIONS

Watch the video again, and try to answer these questions. The answers are below the vocabulary section.
1. Where is Leigh’s Favorite Bookstore located?
2. Who owns Leigh’s Favorite Books?
3. What does Leigh do during the day?
4. What do customers get when they trade in their used books?
5. What kind of books does Leigh sell?
6. What are the names of the two large book distributors that Leigh mentions?
7. Does the store carry books that have been self-published?
9. How does the bookstore compete with ebooks and online stores?

KEY BUSINESS VOCABULARY

The numbers before the word mark the place in the video where the word is used.

LISTENING COMPREHENSION ANSWERS

These are the answers to the listening comprehension questions above.

TRANSCRIPT

Hi. I’m Blythe with Ovient TV, and today we’re in downtown Sunnyvale, on beautiful Murphy Street. We’re here today to talk to Leigh Odum, the owner of Leigh’s Favorite Books.

Today we’re going to talk to Leigh about her process of buying books and what it’s like to run and operate her own bookstore.

What do bookstore owners do all day?

Most people think that bookstore owners sit around and read all day, and as much as I love books, we’re usually busy organizing them, filing them, helping customers find books, so we don’t get a lot of time to sit around and read.

What is your process for buying used books?

Customers come in with their books that they’ve read already and they come in and trade them in. I go through and look, look and pick out the ones I think we can use in the store. The ones we can’t use I give back to them, but the ones I think will sell in our store I give them store credit for and they can buy a new book with that credit.

How do you know what books to sell in your store?

It’s, it’s always hard to predict what people are going to, want to going to buy, but, um, I try to pick books that reflect the interest of our customers. We are here in Silicon Valley; a lot of people have backgrounds in the sciences, so I always try to carry the latest science writing. (Um) Also novels are always very popular. Sometimes I think about specific customers and I try to think “What would, what would this customer like?” and I buy for them.

How do you determine the number of books to order?

I, I check to see how many books we’ve sold of this author in the past, and I gauge my ordering based on that. (Um) Sometimes it’s just a gamble.

Who do you buy your books from?

There’s, there are few large book distributors and they distribute most of the books, even to large chains, actually. (Um) There, one of them is called Ingram and the other is called Baker and Taylor. It makes, I guess, ordering through them allows us to order one book here and there from different publishers so you don’t have to order in bulk from one particular publisher. Sometimes, we do order directly from writers if they have self-published a books, though, yeah.

Do you carry books by local authors?

I try to carry books by local authors. If someone, if a customer comes in and says that they’ve published a book and they live in Sunnyvale, my belief is that if you live in Sunnyvale, you should have your book carried in the local bookstore.

What goes on behind the scenes at a bookstore?

Well, there’s a lot of inventory management. We spend a lot of time stocking our shelves, making sure our physical inventory matches our, our inventory in our database.

How have ebooks affected your business?

We’re constantly aware of the fact that people can go out and buy a book as a, as an ebook. We do try to add value. We have helpful, helpful employees in the store. We try to create a really nice place to browse for books. We, um, we also sell products that aren’t books. We sell gifts and we sell greeting cards, so if we do lose some sales to ebooks, we also gain, we’ve also gained sales from, from greeting cards and gifts.

Has showrooming affected your business?

Yes, showrooming is a problem. My hopes are that if someone comes into my store, and they get helpful customer service, they might see something that they really just can’t live without that moment and they’ll buy something from us.

Why is it important to sell items that are not books?

Well, we wanted to improve the retail experience in our store. Customers would come into our store after having a nice dinner on Murphy Street and some of them aren’t necessarily readers; they might just come in just to browse and, and look, browse through the books and we started carrying things other than books for those customers.