Nintendo, the Japanese video games company that brought us Donkey Kong and Mario the Plumber, is to announce a deal with the publisher HarperCollins today to make literary classics available to read on its DS portable games consoles.

The 100 Classic Book Collection ranges from Shakespeare and Dickens to Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters. It will cost about £20 and will be available initially only in Britain.

Readers will turn the pages by brushing a finger across the screen. If the collection is a success, Nintendo may expand the range of books available.

Other technology giants are trying to gain the upper hand in the rush towards reading books on screen. The Sony Reader, which can hold about 160 titles, was released in September. Users can choose from thousands of titles to down-load from Waterstones’ website.

Amazon, the online retailer, released a similar device, the Kindle, in America this year which also offers subscriptions to newspapers. It is not yet available in Britain.

Nintendo’s first entry into book publishing provides less choice than Sony and Amazon, but at about £100 the DS costs £99 less than the Sony Reader. Latest industry figures from Chart Track show that two million Nintendo DS machines have been sold in Britain.

James Honeywell, a Nintendo executive, said: “When you go on holiday, or if you’re a commuter, lugging around a big paper book can be a bit of an inconvenience. Now you’ve got this whole library that you’re taking with you.

“We hope to encourage people to try books that they wouldn’t go out and purchase themselves.”

HarperCollins is owned by News Corporation, the parent company of Times.

The 100 Classic Book Collection, which will be released on December 26, follows Nintendo’s strategy of trying to broaden the audience for its products. Popular applications for the Nintendo DS include “brain training” games and cookery guides, as well as more typical games fare such as Mario Kart.

In October, Google paid $125 million (£85 million) to settle long-running lawsuits brought against it by American authors and publishers over its plans to scan books and make fully searchable versions available online without the prior permission of copyright holders.