CrossGen has released a press release today that they have canceled their Compendia. The Compendia were two large books, published monthly, which collected the individual titles into a cheaper format. Unfortunately, they found that many readers would begin reading the Compendia and then move on to the regular books.
I have not bought the Compendia myself, but it appears that a surprisingly large number of the people over at Dixonverse did. Meanwhile, Chuck Dixon has commented that one big problem was the lack of newstand distribution, where more casual readers would have loved the cheap way to sample CrossGen’s work. CrossGen may revisit the Compendia in the future. It’s not really a failure of format so much as a marketing problem.