Bond is a spy, not an assassin. A spy with a fine taste, and sophisticated gadgets, womanizer, but can kill cold-bloodedly when necessary. Isn't that how the novel portrayed him?
New JB is more like an assassin, muscle-driven action packed scenes. Maybe it a transformation process toward the real Bond, like batguy mentioned.
So JB is not killed, but live, die, repeat (in other words: reboot)
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In the novels (there are many of them) Bond is a spy, yes, but also an assassin if that makes any sense. He embarks on vendettas and he most certainly "gets dirty" doing it, killing by any means required. He has very fine taste, almost nothing in the way of gadgets, he womanizes, but not nearly as much as the films.
Michael Bergeron's explanation is accurate. Bond typically gets involved with one woman, or two at the absolute most, and not always in accordance with the film formula of "good babe" and "bad babe."
Bond has fine tastes, but mostly as a means to distract himself when he's bored or feeling introspective, and partially because he lives a dangerous life and figures he might as well enjoy eggs over hard and worry about a bullet, than worry about cholesterol that he probably won't live long enough to have kill him. He's also not all-knowing about everything. His knowledge of the finer things in life is that of an enthusiastic consumer, rather than a walking encyclopaedia.
As far as gadgets...he doesn't have any in the Ian Fleming novels. Maybe something like a briefcase with a hidden compartment, but nothing like the high-tech stuff from the films. Bond gets out of scrapes using his mind and his body, not his Bond Utility Belt or Bond-Ray Vision.
And as for being a spy vs. an assassin, he's both. Many of his assignments are about getting information on something, but he ends up having to kill during them. In other assignments, though, he's absolutely tasked with killing. I think it's the novel version of Goldfinger where he thinks back on his last assignment which was an assassination mission, and thinks about what it was like to put a knife through the heart of a man and smell his rank, final breath.
Another thing from the books that is lost in the films is Bond's tendency to criticize himself. This is, in my opinion, where Craig's performance comes in. Bond's allies do get killed, and he's angry and a bit remorseful for it. But you don't see that in almost any of the films. Certainly he never openly blames himself, but Craig allows guilt and frustration to play across his face in his performance. The only other Bonds where this happened that I can think of were Connery in Goldfinger, and Dalton in Licence to Kill.