DB soft-hyphen characters and DB 5: entity doesn't work

Bob Stayton, on p. 172 of his book, says one can use either of two
characters to produce a soft-hyphen (invisible unless the hyphen is
used to break a line):

  Unicode character '­'
  DB entity '­'

With xsltproc, docbook-xsl-ns-1.76.1, and fop 1.0 the Unicode
character works but the entity doesn't.

I've tried '&db:shy' but no go.  What am I something wrong?

Thanks.

Best,

-Tom

Thomas M. Browder, Jr.
Niceville, Florida
USA