iBooks 3.1.1 crashing

Not able to use iBooks 3.1.1 on my iPad. Starting to think something is broken about this iPad because I recently had crashing issues with the Pages app too and now just realized I can't open any of my books. App crashes within seconds of opening any book. I did a hard reset to erase everything off the ipad (hoping that would fix the pages crash...nope) and reset factory settings to default and reinstalled everything. Decided to read one of the books I downloaded to iBooks but didn't finish yet and now the app crashes immediately whereas it worked just fine in the past. A few webpages will crash safari but otherwise all other apps work just fine. I'm already out of my AppleCare plan so not sure really what to do other than to give the apple store geniuses a crack at it or maybe wait for iOS 7 to see if that fixes my issues in any way.