This is incorrect. Fish in general don't have bones in their inner ear. Because fish live in water, and have a body density close to that of water, sound vibrations travel into and through their bodies easily, and they don't need a mechanism to transmit sound from an external opening (like the ears of land animals) to the inner ear.
They have rather the opposite problem -- the sound would pass right through their bodies without much of it being "captured" to be "heard". So they need something of greater or lesser density than water to "register" the sound on. Most fish use the skull itself (pretty much as a whole), as well as mineralized pellets inside the inner ear canals known as otoliths, which vibrate as the sound passes through the inner ear (the *inside* of the inner ear) and the wiggling of these otoliths directly stimulate the nerve endings in the inner ear.
So no, fish don't have "three inner ear bones".
Some families of fish, such as herrings, anchovies, squirrelfish, and others have a swim bladder which extends to near the inner ears and also helps to transmit sound vibrations to the ears (since the swim bladder, filled with air, is also of different density than the surrounding water.
The Ostariophysi take this system to extreme, and actually use four vertebrae as a sound-carrying channel to carry the sound more efficiently from the swim bladder tothe inner ears.
The first fish which had adaptations that allowed them to travel out of the water and onto land would have had ears which worked well in water, but very poorly in air. So there was strong evolutionary pressure to modify existing structures to transmit sound from the outside air (near the skin, obviously) into the location of the inner ear. This is where the amphibian/reptile system of using a modified bone (the hyomandibular in fish) as a sound transmission rod (the stapes bone in amphibians and their descendants). Also the tympanic membrane developed as a specialized region of skin which was thin and vibrated easily when sound was present (as can still be seen on frogs, which have this "surface eardrum" visible behind their eyes).
The reptilian ear was a refinement of this system, with a more specialized stapes and the tympanum sunken below the surface (in some reptile families).
Finally there's the reptile -> mammal transition, in which two of the small jawbones in reptiles migrated to join the stapes to make the classic mammalian inner ear (as documented here).
Carry on!
If you check out my post 29, it seems that the distal strucures of the ear (tympanum, ossicles, etc.) and their evolution coincide nicely with the evolutionary development of the proximal, neural structures of the vertebrate ear (and the data I posted were reported in the 1930's and '40's.)