Abstract Nowadays, reading on screens is an essential part of our daily life.
Tablet computers, with great portability, usability, and interactivity, have become a
popular mobile device for learning and reading. However, there were few studies to
explore the effects on reading using tablet computers, and the difference between
computer-based reading and paper-based reading is still not clear. Therefore, this
study focused on to investigate the effects of reading comprehension across paper,
tablets, and computers. Moreover, the user familiarity was regarded as a potential
issue to affect the reading on digital devices. Accordingly, this study took into
account to figure out the effects and impacts of the user familiarity on reading
comprehension while reading on tablets. Two question types of reading comprehension,
multiple choice questions as the shallow level comprehension and summarization
as deep level comprehension, were considered to test the reading
comprehension. Data from 90 college students were used in the data analysis. It was
indicated that the paper group performed significantly better than the computerbased
reading on the shallow level comprehension. This finding confirmed and
eliminated the factors of reading in paper and computer for the previous studies. For
example, the way of navigation was still the main reason to affect the process of
reading. However, the switch between the reading and test media was not the reason
to affect the reading comprehension. In order to figure out why there was no
difference between tablets and the other two media platforms, the tablet familiarity