Turn off "Actions Available" in Books app

I'm reading a book in the Books app. If I 2-finger swipe down for continuous reading, everything is fine. After reading one paragraph, VoiceOver proceeds to read the next, and the next, with no meaningless verbage between paragraphs.

However, if I read a paragraph at a time, then VoiceOver announces, "Actions available" after each paragraph, heading, etc.

Is there any way to turn that off?

(We used to see similar behavior on MacOS when browsing the web, FWIW, but I believe that issue has been resolved.)