I'm failing to see the big picture here. One author who provides detailed links to a competitor's site gets rejected for a book about self-publishing. It isn't like Apple is rejecting political books with which they disagree or preventing users from reading specific content on their devices. Their store just chose not to sell an item. Supermarkets aren't obligated to stock every possible variety of orange juice, nor should Apple be held to any higher of a standard.
Apple doesn't have an obligation to sell anything and everything. It's their store. They choosing to not sell something isn't "bad" -- users of Apple devices can still read whatever they want.
Acting indignant like Apple has some mandate to sell anything that anyone wants is ridiculous. If you were Coca-Cola, would you let people sell Pepsi from your machines? Of course not. Is Coke bad for choosing not to sell Pepsi? Want Pepsi? Go to a Pepsi machine.
The terms of submission for the iBooks store are pretty obvious. Having that lady's book rejected shouldn't have come as a surprise. A simple RTFM would have told her exactly what would have happened when she links to competitor's stores.
You want to play ball in Apple's park, you have to follow the rules. Disagree with the rules if you want, but don't complain when you don't follow those rules and are asked to leave.
Every few months we seem to go through this Cycle of Indignity. Usually it's because of some App Store rejection. We all piss and moan about it, but for the most part, the App Store has remained a high quality experience (and a profitable one for devs) even though occasionally someone gets offended about something or another.
Put the pitchforks away -- this isn't that big of a deal. Thousands of writers sell through the iBookstore without any problems. This lady's story is an outlier in an otherwise pleasant place. Her real problem is a lack of a decent web developer.