Trade Perspectives: Green Team, Teen Trillionaires and the Argument for Digital Trades

The news that DC Comics has cancelled the collection of Franco and Art Baltazar's Green Team, Teen Trillionaires marks the first New 52 ongoing series not to be collected in trade.* Previously it had seemed that every New 52 series would be collected, as evidenced by the number of cancelled series that received full collections -- Sword of Sorcery, GI Combat, and Team 7, to name a few.

Still, logically we probably might have expected this wouldn't last. And, if we take DC at their word regarding cancelled trades in the past, that pre-orders just weren't there, then logically we can't expect DC to publish a book on which they'd have a reasonable expectation they'd lose money. Admittedly, I did not pre-order Green Team, Teen Trillionaires, though I fully expected to purchase and read it at some point.

All the issues are available digitally, of course, and will be available perpetually, so if I still wanted to read this series, of course I could without much difficulty. For me, however, there is something eminently more satisfying about reading a trade -- in print or in digital -- than reading single issues; even if it's only switching from issue to issue on the same device, there's a mental break in the reading experience that makes it lesser for me than reading a trade. (Also a bunch of single issues messes with your digital trade shelf.) So the fact that Green Team is technically "available" doesn't move me, because it's not available in the format I want.

Which leads me to wonder, why not digital trades? There would be some cost to DC involved in terms of creating a cover and some opening pages, but surely 80 to 90% of the work is already done? Maybe it's costly simply to have the collection on the financial books, but it seems to me that just because the print collection is cancelled, doesn't mean the digital collection must be also. Given the existence of the material already (even already digitized), surely there's sufficient profit to be made from readers like me to "collect" these issues even if not to print them. And then we couldn't say the book hadn't been "collected," either.

Why stop with digital equivalents of print trades? Again, since considerable material is already digitized, can it really be all that much work to bring it together in one package? The long-requested Crisis on Infinite Earths tie-ins collection might be one offered digitally, or a Armageddon 2001 or Eclipso: The Darkness Within annuals collection. A digital trade doesn't even need to concern itself with page quantity, just file size, so the opportunity is there to collect more issues than in a standard trade.

Seems to me "cancelled" doesn't really need to mean "cancelled" any more.

UPDATE (4/22/14): Apparently a digital trade of Green Team is now available. Who knew?

*Various mini-series including Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti's Ray, Phantom Lady, and Human Bomb, plus the four National Comics one-shots, also haven't been collected.