I am a web developer in an organization that deals with creating books. They don't actually print and distribute the books, but they create the book designs in InDesign where they then send them to the printers to be printed and distributed.
The organization is now interested in having users customize portions of books online (logo, certain text, particular images, etc), to be automatically sent to a printer and then distributed. The organization realizes that there are a number of web-to-print solutions that exist, but they are very much interested in creating an in-house, fully customized solution (for a number of reasons, they didn't find the other solutions satisfactory).
Essentially, the desired online experience for the user would be to go through a series of steps, filling in text inputs and uploading images to replace the templated portions of the InDesign file. Further, the user would see a preview of the inputted changes on the screen.
A lot of the burden would be on me developing the software necessary to make this work. I have a lot of experience in a number of programming languages, but have very little experience in the web-to-print industry (as well as little experience in InDesign).
If we were to create a fully customized web-to-print solution in house, where would I begin in finding out how best to implement a solution like this? If one with experience could provide a list of high-level steps needed for implementation or even a bullet list of items to research, I would be extremely appreciative.
Note that we are not interested in actually printing the books, but sending the fully created print-ready design files to the printers for print and distribution.