Is printed the same as published? Many teachers at my university have produced custom course books for their students. These books contain all original content, written by the teacher, and tailored specifically for the course and students. The school does publish a trade journal, but to provide the lowest costs available, and perhaps to keep things simple, the school administrators always simply takes the teachers' course books to the school's print center, photocopies them in the necessary numbers, and staples the pages together with a cheap construction paper cover. I am currently preparing some custom textbooks for my own courses.


If these books are prepared in this same way by the university, is it considered “published”?
How might such a work be presented in an academic CV?
"Published" is a vague word, since for example you can even self-publish a book.

Ideally, a published book will have been carefully selected and edited, widely distributed, archived in many libraries, etc.  How close it comes to this ideal varies, of course.

I don't know whether what you are describing would meet a formal definition of publication, but I'd be careful about how you describe it.

For example, if your book has an ISBN, is labeled with a publisher like "X University Press", and is publicly offered for sale (perhaps only through the university's website and university bookstore), then I would consider it published, even if only on a small scale.  (It may be cheap, but there's no requirement that a published book must have gilded pages.)  However, that sounds unlikely to be true in the case you've described.

Instead, you could describe it in other ways:

If anyone who wants a copy can buy one by getting in touch with your department, then you could describe it as a "book distributed by the Department of ... at University X".

If your book is not offered for sale to anyone except students in the course, then you might describe it as a "book prepared as course materials for ... at University X".

You might also want to specify something like the number of pages, to help distinguish between a lengthy book and shorter lecture notes.