iBooks frozen after mac os sequoia 15.3.1 update

Just recently updated to Mac OS Sequoia 15.3.1 on the Mac Studio (M1, 64 gb, 2 TB SSD) and iBooks comes up with a blank white screen after reboot as show in screenshot. Sometimes iBooks simply comes up with the larger main screen and no inset popup.

I had to force quit the app several times and reboot many times. Although I have closed everything during testing of iBooks, an anomaly is that while iBooks is open in this state, Firefox responds very slowly, but resumes with a force quit of iBooks. The TV, Music & Photo app all work fine thus far. Lastly, none of this happened under previous Sequoia release.

David