Proofreading, a dying art

From Akaky at Passing Parade:

The much put upon reader must wonder if proofreading is so arcane an art, something on the order of translating War and Peace from Russian into Zulu and publishing the resultant text in Braille on children’s aspirin tablets or playing Mozart’s Requiem in waltz time with an orchestra of saws, cowbells, shotguns and kazoos, that publishers can no longer find and hire people capable of reading a simple English sentence and analyzing said sentence for spelling and grammatical errors. Typos fill every other page of this book like crabgrass and I wish someone would program computer spellcheckers to realize that discrete and discreet are not the same word and do not mean the same thing: if a man and another man’s wife remained discrete there would be no need for them to be discreet. Frankly, I think this sort of thing bespeaks a certain contempt for the reader, but that’s just my opinion.