I recommend some reading: Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, and others have commented very convincingly that there is a strong relation between the type if media and the message being conveyed (“The medium is the message”).
There also is a very solid body of knowledge about screen reading habits. We are trained, or we train ourselves, to scan screens in a way that is distinctly different from what we do when we’re reading a book.
I propose that even if Cushing were to make electronically available all the books that they currently hold in their physical library, the learning that occurs would be different. That is, if any of the books are being read. I suspect that this is simply a way of throwing in the towel because the under-18 generation is largely aliterate.