That was the plan, but I think they decided to go with the compendium instead. Although those could be completely unrelated, I don't remember.
There was going to be a nominal fee to get the online copy and unlock the content in the compendium after you bought the book. When it became difficult to implement a "you actually bought the book" security feature they decided to just put all "rule elements" in the compendium from released books and give the content to subscribers without having to pay a nominal fee (or buy the book).
Since they dropped that they couldn't give out the PDF's as well (the Compendium doesn't have certain rules, combat and I think the Alchemy rules from AV are examples) otherwise no subscriber would ever need to buy a book.
