Amazon.com announced that its Kindle was the most gifted item this holiday season as well as the most gifted item in the website’s history. Amazon.com also announced that on Christmas Day, more of its customers purchased e-books than physical books.

It’s unclear if those “purchases” include the free Kindle e-books offered on the site, however. The Washington Post reports:

[…] Amazon’s customers have made it clear that $9.99 is still too high for their taste. Most titles in the company’s list of top 100 Kindle bestsellers are priced below $9.99, and the most popular price point is $0.00.

Media Bistro’s GalleyCat blog did an informal count and found that more than 60 of the top 100 were priced at $0.00.

Sarah Weinman at Daily Finance has an interesting analysis of all of this, which begins with the statement, “What’s missing here is the thing that has been missing for the entire history of the Kindle — real, numerical data.”

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The Library of Congress has digitally scanned more than 60,000 books in its collection as part of a project called Digitizing American Imprints. “The Library chose books that people wanted, but that were too old and fragile to serve to readers,” said Michael Handy, a co-manager of the project.

The America.gov website reports:

Many of the newly digitized LOC works contain hard-to-obtain Civil War regimental histories and county, state and regional information relating to specific people, their occupations and families, and other details that are important for historians and genealogists.

The digital books can be accessed through the Library of Congress’ catalog website and through the Internet Archive. Once scanned, the physical texts are retired to a storage facility for preservation.