Minkel Walter, recently read about a school district in Texas that's supplying its fifth- and sixth-grade students with laptops. Along with electronic copies of textbooks, the laptops will also contain a "library" of about 2,000 books--"classics of Western civilization"--packaged by Vital Source Technologies and sold for about 5200 per computer. The package includes a handy software program that compresses the books into a space of about half a gigabyte, along with a search engine to help students find words and concepts in those hooks. So far, so good. But when the author checked with the North Carolina software company, he learned that these pre-loaded books include titles such as Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. What does he have against these masterpieces? Absolutely nothing. He just hates paying for something that's free for the taking. The fact is, there are thousands of free books available online, and odds are you can use some of them in your school or library. They don't include modern blockbusters like Harry, Potter or Shel Silverstein's poems, but they do include Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Brothers Karamazov, the works of Mark Twain, and, yes, those of Hawthorne and Melville. In other words, they're books that have passed into the public domain--titles that date back to 1923 or earlier.