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Given that sales have fallen off over the past year, what will it take for consumers to fall in love with tablets again? If you're Apple, you might answer, "A larger model that's aimed more as a direct replacement for your old laptop." And if you're Amazon, you might answer, "Make them dirt cheap, and they will come."According to the Wall Street Journal, Amazon plans to release a $50, 6-inch tablet ahead of the holiday shopping season. At $50, not only is the tablet half the price of Amazon's current cheapest tablet, the Kindle Fire HD 6, but puts it in the range of a burner Android smartphone you'd find at Walmart.Amazon is likely able to get the price of the tablet down to $50 by outsourcing as much of its development as possible to overseas firms, according to the WSJ. Amazon also has a habit of including ads (also known as "special offers" in Amazon-speak) on its devices to help subsidize the price, though consumers can sometimes pay extra to remove these ads.That Amazon would release such a cheap tablet shouldn't exactly surprise anyone who pays even the slightest attention to the company: all of Amazon's devices and services, from Kindle hardware to free app promotions, are effectively tools designed to get consumers to subscribe to Prime, the company's $99 per year program that includes perks like free two-day shipping on many items, a library of streaming video and music, and, as of this morning, food deliveries from select restaurants in Seattle. That's because the average Prime member spends roughly twice as much on Amazon as non-members.Amazon has not publicly commented on any of this, as you might imagine.