Current version of automake is 1.16.2, and the build will fail if version does not match. One way to fix this is to refer this post. But in order to use autoreconf, you may have to install libtools. Another problem that might occur during the build process is that make install has to be executed as root.

TLDR; Added commands before for simplification. Just run them.

autoreconf -f -i
./configure && make && make check && sudo make install

Although it is not added in the README, if you want to uninstall this library, you simply have to run:

sudo make uninstall

It would still be better if the owner of the repository patches with the new changes.