Remember the AppAdvice post that Quillblog pointed to last week about the pricing of e-books from Apple’s iBookstore? The one that had The New York Times’ bestsellers priced at $9.99, which would be competitive with Amazon’s e-book prices for the Kindle? The one that the poster insisted “was not a rumor” and could be taken as tantamount to a papal bull? Yeah, that one. Well, it turned out to be … erm … horse puckey.

In a post dated March 26, AppAdvice includes “before” and “after” screenshots of iBookstore, which indicate that the Times bestsellers formerly priced at $9.99 have been given a $3.00 increase. This was done “[f]or unknown reasons,” according to the AppAdvice poster, who continues:

This sudden change is extremely intriguing. Is Apple using this to figure out where the leak is coming from? Did Amazon react to our announcement and pressured [sic] publishers to rise [sic] the prices? We don’t know. It also remains to be seen if these price changes are just temporary or definitive.

At least the erstwhile mien of definitiveness has been abandoned by AppAdvice. It’s actually kind of amusing to think of the folks at Apple’s iBookstore arbitrarily changing their prices just to see how the Internet rumour mill will react. In the current newsgathering environment, which prizes speed above accuracy, the early bird gets the worm, but usually ends up choking on it.