Plus 1 for “Snowy” as your avatar (and yes, I know he’s originally “Milou”).
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I just tried the above command, and there is one slight issue with it. Calibre successfully gets installed, but it fails to create the launchable icon, which is how one typically launches programs. You can run calibre from the terminal, and it will work, but not having the icon is a bit frustrating. I could spend some time to figure out how to get the icon working, but I don’t have the time right now.
On another note, have you tried GNOME Books? I have not - I don’t tend to use ebooks - but it looks like a possible alternative to Calibre.
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I would advise Flatpaks rather than piping a script from the internet into sudo. Check out https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.calibre_ebook.calibre
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Calibre is a cool product but a bitch to package. The creator prefers one integrated package with all dependencies included, so the Debian maintainers have a somewhat hard time to disentangle the dependencies and using system packages instead.
Careful with that install script that one is supposed to execute as root. It retrieves dependencies individually but not as system packages and you end up with multiple copies of python, etc on your system. So that script does something different that installing calibre via apt. And it differs from flatpacks, snaps etc too.
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Do I understand you correctly, spaetz, that the difficulties you are mentioning are not referring to Flatpaks?
Absolutely. I would wager that a flatpack is easier to install and remove as the changes are isolated and well defined in its scope. Executing a script as root that installs dependencies potentially all over the system which might be hard to ever clean up is tricky.
And disentangling such a blob of dependencies to make use of system packages is a tricky job for the packager of Calibre. The creator of Calibre (Koyal?) unfortunately has very strong opinions on how he thinks the packaging is supposed to work best, if I remember correctly. I remember most of that from discussions on the lwn.net website.