Books app keeps crashing

I'm using an iPad 6th Gen running iPadOS 16.2

Until the latest update Books worked flawlessly. Now it minimizes and returns to the home screen (of the app) at random, often only after a few seconds. I've performed all the usual steps including uninstalling and re-installing the app. Strangely enough. iTunes showed all my files (PDFs) as present on the ipad, but Books would not detect them, and I had to delete and re-load them all (560 files) which, given their varied locations took some time. I've only used about 50% of my storage, and only open one file at a time.

I note that there was an issue reported some time back regarding this same phenomena under OS 15.1, however, I had no issues back then, this is new to me? Given that this is the default app, how can I fix this, or, at least, allow Acroread to access the same location on the iPad where the documents are stored.