That would be one way to DB it. The other would be to attach image files to records in the DB.
This looks to me to be an image file (paper curl again.) If it were found out that image files aren't used - they use the method you describe above - then something would be amiss. Or, as you say, a special case here where they went and scanned the book.
The point is, the short form is wholly created by a computer program from facts recorded in a database.
Whereas, for a long form, the role of the database, if any, would have to be limited to storing and retrieving images scanned at various levels of quality. The textual data in such a database would have to be OCR'ed from the scanned images or be entered by a human or some combination, e.g., scan, OCR, then human proofreads and corrects. There are fancy document management systems available to support that sort of work flow on a large scale. They tend to be used by insurance companies and big law firms handling cases involving mounds of discovery paper.
I would surmise that Hawaii does not have the images scanned into their DB (a mistake in my view). That's why they discourage people from getting their long form. It's really simple to produce a CoLB from the database. But to fulfill a request for a long form, they have to go find the physical original bound in a book, push the book down on a copier, and press the button. That's a lot more work. But that's apparently what they did in this case.