The phrase "a compact edition" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe a version of a book, dictionary, or other publication that is smaller in size but still contains the essential content.
Example: "I prefer to carry a compact edition of the dictionary in my bag for quick reference."
Alternatives: "a condensed version" or "a smaller format".
She uses a steak knife and a magnifying glass from a compact edition of the O.E.D.
Under Thomson, The Times issued a compact edition and intensified its focus on business, sports, politics, and international affairs.
Tomorrow, the Wall Street Journal raises the stakes again, with the multi-million-dollar launch of a compact edition and further investment in its online content.
Somehow, through all the years, she had continued to regard us as quasi in-laws, sending flowers when my grandparents died, and giving me a compact edition of the O.E.D. as a college-graduation present.
Zelco has sold 30 million of the lights since then; they now come in almost a dozen versions, including a small one for children, a compact edition for travel, and one that talks (with a 10-second recording).
The two volumes comprising the Ancient Records of Assyria, presented for the first time in a single compact edition the entire body of the Assyrian historical records in a Western language, may form not only a monument to the careful scholarship of Professor Luckenbill, but also a valuable contribution to historical knowledge.
More TV Done Right -- The Complete Monty Python's Flying Circus Collector's Edition ($159.95; A&E) is no more than the lads deserve, a new slightly more compact edition of their groundbreaking, wall-breaking and indeed ceiling-breaking TV series, along with loads and loads of extras.
The compact edition adheres to a specific idea of what a good novel ought to be: the contemporary aesthetic of the realist psychological novel.
The compact edition adheres to a specific idea of what a good novel ought to be.…cut out the self-indulgent stuff and present a clean story, inhabited by plausible characters — the "taut, spare, driving" narrative beloved of Sunday reviewers.… When you come to the end of the compact "Moby-Dick" you don't think, What a betrayal; you think, Nice job — what were the missing bits again?
Then, in 2013, a handsome facsimile edition, "The Gorgeous Nothings," was published by New Directions, followed, this fall, by a compact selected edition, "Envelope Poems," the fruits of a collaboration between the Dickinson scholar Marta Werner and the poet and visual artist Jen Bervin.
When I was 19, my father gave me an Oxford English Dictionary, the 1971 compact edition with the 1987 supplement.
