OK, I took a look into this and found the reason why the interaction is crashing out. The code is trying to find the closest bookshelf which contains the book to get/put and the inv_owner_dist() function in posture_path is crashing as it tries to estimate the distance to the book stack. The code isn't expecting the container to be on a surface. I got the distance estimator working by having it check for a parent_slot on the owner and estimating the distance to that instead. Once I did that, sims would walk up to the coffee table the book stack was sitting on to get their book.
But although it did work for that book stack sitting on a coffee table, some of the code in that function is gibberified by decompiling and so it's throwing exceptions for other pathfinding calls. I'm not 100% sure what it should be doing, so this is probably best fixed by EA rather than a script mod.
ETA - I think you should also be able to make it work properly by overriding the default get/put for that object's inventory component - although that will likely make it where you MUST have the object on a surface, which isn't optimal either.
