I finally got calibre to install. I didn't have to recompile/rebuild PIL. The C _imaging module from PIL was missing a python library dependency because I ./configured python to install without the "--enabled-shared" option which deprived it of a library it needed. I traced the missing library that lead to my discovery by importing _imaging in the python shell the error it gave was a missing library error. So I merely enabled that option during python configuration and I got it to install.