This week, Amazon refreshed its Kindle e-readers and released a new iPad competitor, the Kindle Fire.

To begin, the media has ignored the rather dubious name of Kindle Fire. Kindle actually means "to begin burning, set a fire, ignite," hence the idea is that the Kindle would ignite or start a new market.

But Kindle Fire is redundant. It's like going to buy the new Automobile Car or the Flying Airplane. Equally as senseless is the phrase "snack food," and that's actually used.

That said, I'm not sure what I'd call the thing since Amazon wanted to ride the Kindle moniker for its brand name.

So, what is the point of this device and why is everyone so jacked up over it? Prognosticators predict that it will kill everything except the Apple iPad. I might agree if it were selling for $99, rather than $199. The fact is, players that want to enter the market will merely lower their prices to $199. I'd even expect to see 10-inch units for $199 within six months. The Kindle Fire has a smaller 7-inch screen.

However, looming evidence suggests that the whole pad market may be peaking. People who wanted or needed pads are all in and often own more than one pad. I'm seeing less and less pads at meetings as people return to their laptops.

Serious iPad users heavily consume of media of all sorts. They have a slew of subscriptions to all the magazines and newspapers that they once received by mail. Most other users happily use their laptops or desktop machines to read alternative web-based content.

Still, I'm not absolutely sure that these magazines and newspapers will make an actual living selling iPad subscriptions to the masses.

Typically, a magazine that sells millions of copies in print is selling around 10,000 iPad subscriptions. These numbers reflect the experience readers want—people still enjoy curling up with a magazine—and the price they will pay.

These iPad magazines have to make a decision: Either correct the pricing issues, or give in on the idea.

Advertising generates most of the revenues for print magazines. The subscription price you pay may contribute to the profits, but generally just covers the ink, paper, printing and distribution costs.

With an iPad magazine, the paper costs fall to zero, as does the ink and printing. Distribution expenditures include the cost of the bandwidth needed to deliver one copy of the magazine as a data file, which is basically nil.

The main expenses are now preparation, content aggregation, and layout—the basic organizational overhead—which advertising should cover. So, to bring in more money, glossies need to increase readership to attract more advertisers. How do any expect to do this unless the cost of the subscription is as close to free as possible?

Business Insider cites my favorite example: Condé Nast offers The New Yorker for $59.99 per year on the iPad. (A $10 discount from the print edition.)"

Really? Are you kidding me? It should be $1 per year, at most.

Watching old media venture into the new media scene with old media ideas is kind of fun for a while, but it gets tiresome fast.

Will magazines ever get a clue and will the pad devices provide them with some new income stream that is more than a faddish moment in history? Nothing is even close to being resolved. All I know for sure is that some of what I am seeing is daffy.

You can Follow John C. Dvorak on Twitter @therealdvorak.

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