Is The Amazing Spider-Man A Reboot?

When Columbia Pictures announced 2012 Marvel film The Amazing Spider-Man would not star Tobey Maguire as the Webbed Wonder but instead Andrew Garfield, telling "an exciting new story in the Spider-Man universe" and taking place in Peter Parker's college years, fans had one word on their minds: reboot. Certainly, with Garfield's Spidey set to use mechanical web-shooters and a new suit revealed for his version, that has looked to be the case recently, but executive producer Avi Arad has thrown a spanner into the works by saying the franchise still fits together. Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Arad- a producer on all three of the original Spider-Man films and now Amazing- said that "it's not a comeback. [The Amazing Spider-Man] is going to tell stories that you didn't see in movies 1, 2 and 3", not erasing the previous origins story but "trying to weave a narrative that could take place within the framework of the earlier films". What the heck? We're saying, then, that Peter discovers his powers at another point in time to when the 2003 established, and Curt Connors becomes the Lizard despite never doing so in the original three...? That makes very little sense in the franchise continuity, so we'll have to wait until July 2012 to find out how Amazing deals with what's come before (or rather after) it!