A review is given on the thermodynamical structure of bipartite entanglement. By comparing it to the axiomatic formulation of thermodynamics presented by Giles it is shown that for finite dimensional systems the two theories are formally inequivalent. The same approach is used to demonstrate the full equivalence in the asymptotic limit for pure quantum states. For mixed states a different method for obtaining the second law is described applied to two different classes of operations, PPT-preserving and asymptotically non-entangling operations.