The basic principle of entanglement processing says that entanglement cannot increase under local operations and classical communication. Based on this principle, we show that any entanglement measure E suitable for the regime of a high number of identically prepared entangled perils satisfies E-D less than or equal to E less than or equal to E-F, where E-D and E-F are the entanglement of distillation and formation, respectively. Moreover, we exhibit a theorem establishing a very general form of bounds for distillable entanglement.