Reports of what Apple just did with their policy tightening and how that affected Sony’s e-book Reader seem extremely sketchy right now, but the gist of it is that Apple has tightened its rules on in-app purchases. Sony has appeared to say that Apple has rejected their e-book app for the iPhone—the Android version, however, did make it into the Market.

At first, it looked like the Sony app got nixed by Apple due to using in-app purchases, something that Apple already discourages through extreme bites into the revenues (almost 30% of every transaction) but then we shortly learn from Sony that their app in fact does not use in-app payments. In fact, they use the same gimmick that Amazon and B&N use to get around this rule from Apple by sending users to the web to make purchases.

The current best news comes from a Sony PR contact with the Technologizer blog,

If Sony’s rejected app sent you to the iPhone’s browser to buy books, like the Amazon, B&N, and Kobo ones do–well, why doesn’t the Times say so? And just who are the other developers who have been told they can’t sell content within apps?

[UPDATE: A representative of Sony’s PR company wrote to tell me that the functionality of the rejected iPhone app is “essentially the same” as the Reader app for Android–which, like other companies’ iPhone apps, launches a browser for book buying. I hope there’s some explanation here other than Apple intentionally changing the rules that other e-reader apps have played by until now. We’ll see. Maybe…]

The Technologizer blog post is referring to a New York Times piece by Claire Cain Miller and Miguel Heft that ends up making this entire thing more confusing than easy to understand. This move by Apple has generated a bit of speculation in the blog media if it will affect Amazon and B&N, but most thing that it will not—however, reading what Sony has to say about how their app works, and knowing both Kindle and B&N’s e-book purchases work the same, it certainly could.

Perhaps Apple will simply grandfather their readers into iOS devices, making them exempt from the new restriction. Amazon’s Kindle did just extend their service and is moving into greener pastures with their digital platform; it is really a bad time for Apple to attempt to cut them out of the loop when they could benefit greatly from a partnership. Why kick out the people who deliver users to your device due to versatility when they could buy a Kindle or another e-book reader and skip your device for a different smartphone?

It could have something to do with Apple gearing up to rebalance the battlefield between apps, themselves, and other app stores. They do have an extremely established app ecology already, but it’s not like Sony represents some up-and-comer that would threaten their ability to deliver e-book content. We’ll certainly know more when Amazon and B&N chime in about how this may or may not affect them.

Apple has yet to comment on rejecting Sony’s e-reader app so we can’t know exactly what they were thinking or why they decided to do it.