The state of electronic documents is characterised by chaos (mixed HTML applications, very slow spread of XML, frequently occurring e-books compatible with nothing, book and journal publishers issuing materials in PDF, Word being the most popular text editor). In order to clear the situation up, it is worth considering how would the ideal electronic text look like. According to the author: it should be browsable, searchable, convertible, correctable, suitable for taking notes of it, copyable, quotable, printable, citadel, identifiable, verifiable, portable, ownable, and transferable. So long no standards could meet all these criteria, therefore several formats must be used, selecting the one best suiting the given purpose. The second part of the study describes the typical problems occurring during the application of the most frequently used formats (Word, RTF, HTML, SGML, XML, PDF, editor softwares, e-book standards).