This article describes the results of a study aimed at revealing a potential correlation between the level of understanding of a text and the format of its presentation (printed or digital). Namely, we expected a lower level of comprehension for digitally presented text compared to its hard copy printed analogue due to the higher cognitive ‘cost’ of reading in digital environment. We also expected that the use of extra materials (EM) providing additional information to the main text is related to the format of text’s presentation. Sixty volunteers (39 females, mean age = 20 ± 0.6 years old) participated in the study. They were administered Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices (SPM); then, they read the stimuli (pop-science text) in either digital, or printed, or hybrid format, completed a questionnaire assessing the level of text’s understanding and, finally, answered questions of a semi-structured interview. The crosstab, F-test and Kruskal-Wallis test were used for statistical analysis. We found no significant differences between the levels of understanding of texts of different formats. However, most participants showed low levels of comprehension; also, they used EM (hyperlinks) less when working with digital text compared to its printed analogue. The latter result might be due to higher cognitive load when reading a text on the screen than reading a printed text. The low level of understanding suggests that basic cognitive skills are more important in reconstruction of text’s meaning than the format of text’s presentation.