Calibre Replacement Considerations

This blog post <https://anarc.at/software/desktop/calibre/> popped up
in my screensaver display a few minutes ago, and was interesting enough
for me to find the original. Calibre is the well-known software package
for viewing and managing ebooks and converting between formats. As the
blog writer says:

     It's used by Linux geeks as well as Windows power-users and vastly
     surpasses any native app shipped by ebook manufacturers. I know
     almost exactly zero people that have an ebook reader that do *not*
     use Calibre.

However, there seem to be quite a few problems with it, not the least
of which is that the principal developer seems to have trouble
appreciating security vulnerabilities.

Another issue is that it is written in Python 2 (though an in-progress
port to Python 3 seems to be mostly “going well”). At one point the
developer claimed that wasn’t a big deal, as he could continue to
maintain Python 2 himself after it became obsolete upstream, but he
seems to have backtracked from that position. One pressing problem is
that newer versions of Calibre depend on Python 2 libraries that are no
longer available in Debian (and therefore would also disappear from all
the usual Debian derivatives, like Ubuntu and Linux Mint).

However, the list of useful functions that Calibre performs is
remarkably long, so finding substitutes for them all is going to be
rather daunting.
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