Some of the best fiction I've read in recent years has been Y.A., especially books by M.T. Anderson, like his "Feed," the first paragraphs of which pulled me in when I saw the book on a table at my local bookstore awhile back:
"We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.
"We went there on a Friday, because there was shit-all to do at home. It was the beginning of spring break . . . but I mean we were all pretty null, because for the last like hour we'd been playing with three uninsulated wires that were coming out of the wall."
Haven't yet read his Nat'l Book Award-winning "The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing," but it looks good as well.

This post has two questionable premises:

(1) Westlaw and Lexis are just expensive versions of something available for free; and
(2) The U.S. Government is paying millions to access Westlaw and Lexis.

Many posters have addressed (1), but what about (2)?

I searched the government reports in the linked scribd site (including the Judiciary Information Technology Fund Annual Report), but couldn't find any line item for the cost to the courts (and by extension, us) for the use of either service. This didn't surprise me, because I believe they don't pay for them at all. When I externed for a federal judge, I was told I could use either service as often as I wanted, because they both donated their services to the courts. Now maybe there's some other objection to Lexis and Westlaw giving their services to courts (and to law students) for free (e.g., it's antitrust dumping & prevents entry into the market by competitors), but unless someone can point to an actual cost to the government of using these services, it looks like premise (2) above is faulty, which means, according to the points raised above, that the courts are currently receiving *for free* a service with a lot of added value, making it not at all surprising that they wouldn't need a new free service that lacks the added value.