Pretty much. Companies won't approve buying an individual book, but they will approve a subscription to a learning platform.
It's too much work to approve all these random purchases, but if you don't review them, you end up paying for a bunch of unused subscriptions all over the place as well as people buying a ton of stuff that doesn't really benefit the company that much.
Back in the day at Hughes Aircraft, and later, at least for a while, at Boeing, we had a "Library", though which anyone could request a book. If the library did not have it, they would purchase a copy, and "loan" it to the requestor indefinitely. If another request for the same book came in, the original requestor would be asked to "return" it to the library. The library also maintained subscriptions to all relevant technical journals and standards publications.
This system was awesome because book purchases did not require management approval, so there were no denials and little delay involved.
You weren't listening. It's one platform, which means that the guy that costs the company $200K annually who approves expenditures wasn't overworked and could eliminate a bunch of waste across twenty teams.
I mean sure, a cynical person might ask why even bother paying that guy when his salary could be divided up into $10K per team for a hundred books a year per team, but that kind of talk gets you dragged in front of HR for a "discussion".
It's too much work to approve all these random purchases, but if you don't review them, you end up paying for a bunch of unused subscriptions all over the place as well as people buying a ton of stuff that doesn't really benefit the company that much.