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"Real" proofreading is hugely labour intensive. It takes me 100-200h of work to properly proof-read one of the Dickens novels that I create, for example. By "real" proof-reading I mean comparing it line by line with the manuscript, and making sure that every punctuation mark is correct. If you simply read the OCR page and fix things that "look wrong", it's much quicker, but also much less accurate, of course, in that you've often no way to know when the OCR has used the wrong word if that word still "fits" in the context of the sentence.
One can certainly understand why publishers are reluctant to spend the money to properly proof OCR's "back-catalog" stuff that they convert to eBooks. Obviously a professional proof-reader can do the job a lot faster than I can, but the fact remains that it's still a labour-intensive, manual, process that costs money.
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