Successful reading comprehension relies on a complex set of skills and processes to derive meaning from text. These skills and processes have been articulated in extant accounts of reading comprehension in the context of both single and multiple texts. However, the increasingly complex digital ecosystem brought about by the Internet imposes additional challenges to our understanding of comprehension in authentic reading contexts. One such challenge is understanding the processes by which comprehension unfolds in collaborative contexts where multiple readers work together to understand a text. As a first step in addressing this challenge, we review prominent accounts of single- and multiple-text comprehension, which serve a basis for an initial proposal of the collaborative reading comprehension (CRC) framework. The goal of CRC is to provide a preliminary understanding of the representational and processing aspects of collaborative comprehension, as well as to stimulate future empirical work. [This is the online first version of an article published in "Learning and Cognition."]