Adding epubs to Kobo from my phone

I’ve got a Kobo e-reader, which is very fussy about the USB cable used to copy books to it (and even the USB port the cable is connected to). I want to be able to sideload books from, e.g. Project Gutenberg to it from my phone. The (beta) web browser that’s included with the Kobo is very basic, and I’ve struggled to get it to work with most web sites, so the obvious solution doesn’t really work.

With thanks to this post, I figured out a way to do this.

Essentially you download your books using Chrome on the phone, and then use termux, which give a Linux-like environment on the phone, to run a minimal web-server whose output works with the Kobo’s browser.

Setup

At the termux prompt: (this only needs to be done once)

termux-setup-storage # Gives access to the Download folder on android 
pkg install python3 # Install Python

To use

Enable tethering on the phone (I also found I had to disable the VPN running on the phone)

At the termux prompt:

ifconfig # Note the ip associated with wlan0
cd ~/storage/downloads # Assuming this is where the book is
python -m http.server 8080

On the Kobo, connect to the phone’s hotspot, open the browser (more, beta features), and navigate to http://<phone’s ip>:8080 This gives a very basic directory listing, which works OK on the Kobo