  The problem of of how many entangled or, respectively, separable states there
are in the set of all quantum states is investigated. We study to what extent
the choice of a measure in the space of density matrices describing
N--dimensional quantum systems affects the results obtained. We demonstrate
that the link between the purity of the mixed states and the probability of
entanglement is not sensitive to the measure chosen. Since the criterion of
partial transposition is not sufficient to distinguish all separable states for
N > 6, we develop an efficient algorithm to calculate numerically the
entanglement of formation of a given mixed quantum state, which allows us to
compute the volume of separable states for N=8 and to estimate the volume of
the bound entangled states in this case.
